[1mike12]

It's not as if there's an amount X you can sell less of where it's totally fine, but if you go over, you're in trouble. Nobody would be dumb enough to sell their entire position, but at the same time, if you did have insider knowledge, you wouldn't want to have all your position tank. So what do you do? You could go a little bit in the middle and claim ignorance. Trading based off of insider knowledge is illegal regardless of the amount of trades, but in practice obviously the government only chases after egregious cases.

[oconnor663]

I think the idea of the question is, if you're talking about the difference between losing 50% of your value (doing nothing), and losing 49% of your value (making a small illegal trade), would it make sense to expose yourself to criminal liability for that 1%, even if that 1% represents a lot of money in absolute terms?