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Insider trade on Splunk acquisition?

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417 points mkmk | 1 comments | 21 Sep 23 15:58 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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xyzelement ◴[21 Sep 23 16:54 UTC] No.37600439[source]▶
I don't know if this is genuinely suspicious or not. Is buying 20K of options an unusual thing? Or is this something that happens regularly with options expiring worthless or with a small gain - and it just happened to hit big this time?

IE "someone bought a lottery ticket and won" - interesting to know if they play the lottery every other day (and don't usually win?)

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trowawee ◴[21 Sep 23 17:00 UTC] No.37600544[source]▶
"short-dated out-of-the-money call options that cash out a day after a merger/acquisition" is, like, the definition of a suspicious transaction. Somebody's gonna get a knock on the door from the SEC.
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mcast ◴[21 Sep 23 17:04 UTC] No.37600594[source]▶
Maybe unless that person was a US senator/congressperson.
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mandevil ◴[21 Sep 23 17:30 UTC] No.37600997[source]▶
This is false. Then-sitting Congressman Chris Collins (R-NY) pled guilty and was sentenced to 26 months in prison for insider-trading back in 2019-2020. He was pardoned by President Donald Trump as one of his last official acts as President, but Collins still spent 10 weeks in prison for insider-trading as a sitting congressman (this was for knowledge he gained outside of his duties as a congressman, it was knowledge he got as a member of the Board of a company).

Congresspersons separately aren't allowed to trade on things they learn from their job- that was banned in 2012 under the STOCK act.

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dmoy ◴[21 Sep 23 17:34 UTC] No.37601070[source]▶
Banned, but not enforced, and due to the 2013 removal of electronic disclosure requirements, harder to detect?

https://campaignlegal.org/update/part-2-stock-act-failed-eff...

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1. mandevil ◴[21 Sep 23 18:18 UTC] No.37601685{3}[source]▶
Eh, my take is that the electronic disclosure stuff makes this more annoying for the activists- the people who are building dashboards of Congressional performance etc.- but doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the problem. The activists still build their dashboards, still comb through the documents and find things that look really bad, it's just slightly more out of date and slightly more work for them.

I do think that something like the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act (everything in a blind trust), or its even more draconian (no blind trusts, just sell!) Ban Stock Trading for Government Officials Act will probably pass, eventually. Those are general markers for where we are going. But to just say "It's not illegal if you are a Member of Congress" is flat wrong and encourages a level of cynicism that makes it harder to actually fix the problems we face today.