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Insider trade on Splunk acquisition?

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417 points mkmk | 3 comments | 21 Sep 23 15:58 UTC | HN request time: 1.678s | source
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ryanSrich ◴[21 Sep 23 17:48 UTC] No.37601280[source]▶
Where's the line for insider trading on something like this? Say you were a low level Splunk or Cisco employee and you had a hunch the acquisition was going to close sometime this week (you're not working on the deal, you just heard through the grapevine that it's happening). Is that considered insider trading?
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riffraff ◴[21 Sep 23 17:52 UTC] No.37601345[source]▶
> Is that considered insider trading?

AFAIU, the use of material non-public information always qualifies as insider trading. It does not matter how you got it, and it does not even matter if you work at the company.

See https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/materialinsiderinformat...

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1. lokar ◴[21 Sep 23 18:09 UTC] No.37601576[source]▶
Oh, but it does matter. Insider trading is a kind of theft. A theft from the person or company that had the info and (generally) whose trust you violated.

If you develop the info yourself (say, monitoring how full parking lots are at a store to predict earnings), that is fine.

Insider trading is about theft of information, not fairness.

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2. paganel ◴[21 Sep 23 19:35 UTC] No.37602970[source]▶
I wonder what would happen were those stores to say: “hey, those parking lots are ours and such they are private, as a result any information related to them is ours and hence private”?
3. riffraff ◴[22 Sep 23 07:54 UTC] No.37609184[source]▶
if you develop it yourself, by definition you are doing it based on public information, so it does not apply.