<story><title>The Secret of Billions</title><url>https://medium.com/@jaltucher/the-secret-of-billions-4a42b256eb7#.1b5xc3lr0</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fiatmoney</author><text>&amp;quot;Insider Trading: But basically, if you know information that is private (“Company A is buying Company B”) then you are not allowed to make money on that information.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I see this misconception all the time &amp;amp; I&amp;#x27;m really surprised to see it in this context.  The sine qua non of &amp;quot;insider trading&amp;quot; is being &lt;i&gt;an insider&lt;/i&gt;.  If I know of a merger because I overhear the parties talking about it in a restaurant, or I&amp;#x27;ve hired private investigators to see who&amp;#x27;s visiting who&amp;#x27;s offices, there is no issue.  There has to be some relationship that obliges me to keep that information private.  The only way markets work is by surfacing &amp;quot;private information&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The essence of stock market law in the US is this: every transaction has to have risk in it. If you eliminate risk by, for instance, paying for information that nobody else knows, then you have committed a crime.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s just completely wrong.  If I hire a satellite to track car dealer inventories, buy Ford as a result, and make a ton of money, I&amp;#x27;m doing my damn job.  No one has committed a crime.  Ditto if I sell that data rather than trading on it directly.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Secret of Billions</title><url>https://medium.com/@jaltucher/the-secret-of-billions-4a42b256eb7#.1b5xc3lr0</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>Insider trading increases the speed with which information is encoded into prices and thus speeds up price discovery, which is the core function of the market.&lt;p&gt;But it does so by creating agency problems. Either directly or indirectly, the information being traded on in these schemes comes from people who work for the shareholders of the company. A particular problem is that insiders can profit both from the wins &lt;i&gt;and losses&lt;/i&gt; of their employers; it&amp;#x27;s the magnitude that matters, not the sign.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s already a lot of evidence that company insiders, particularly in management, will routinely harm their employers for their own personal benefit (see, for instance, abusive stock buybacks). It doesn&amp;#x27;t seem smart to create new mechanisms for that to happen.</text></comment>