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by datashow 2379 days ago
I'm confused. Influencing the market is the same as insider trading?
2 comments

In the case of Trump I think GP is alleging that some people know that Trump is about to make a specific tweet, allowing those people to trade based on their knowledge of how the market will react. Whether Trump does this in purpose or is a manipulated pawn is anyone's guess.
The accusation is that someone else is doing the insider trading based on prior knowledge of the tweet content.
The accusation: "The president of the United States engages in insider trading regularly, right in front of the whole world, on Twitter. "

And "Why is this downvoted? This is an openly true fact."

Apparently, they equal influencing the market to insider trading.

Lol I love this stuff.

Trumpians: Trump is a genius playing 16D chess over everyone's game of chutes and ladders!!!!

OMB-ppl: OM is a baby in a diaper and needs the nanny to wipe his ...

Also OMB-ppl: He's a conniving insider trading, evil, russian puppet!!! Being used by Kim Jong Un and the young turks!!!!

Reality: His tweets are direct thoughts from his head, no one sees them before they're sent out and he doesn't even look them over for spelling and grammar mistakes.

Also Planet Money tried to trade based on his tweets and found you'd be better off just picking a random index fund or using the S&P. (That's including the followup episode where they got a less naive algorithm.)

PS. My opinion: I've only just started watching southpark but it seems they've hit the nail on the head about him, he's probably a tiny bit more charismatic, but really he's just doing this because people mocked him and he didn't think he would win. If you take an objective look at what he's accomplished and what he wants to do he's doing a perfectly average job. Every president in recent memory has abused the office for personal gain: Clinton got sex, Bush got back at the ME for embarrassing pops, Obama deputized the IRS and now Trump asked the Ukrainians to "take care of" Biden. I don't think he's a great president, but anyone calling him satan has an agenda that involves some law-breaking, possibly "light" treason.

> Every president in recent memory has abused the office for personal gain: Clinton got sex, Bush got back at the ME for embarrassing pops, Obama deputized the IRS...

At least one of those is clear propaganda talking points you picked up from less-than ingenuous sources:

"In 2013, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revealed that it had selected political groups applying for tax-exempt status for intensive scrutiny based on their names or political themes. This led to wide condemnation of the agency and triggered several investigations, including a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal probe ordered by United States Attorney General Eric Holder. "

"In January 2014, James Comey, who at the time was the FBI director, told Fox News that its investigation had found no evidence so far warranting the filing of federal criminal charges in connection with the controversy, as it had not found any evidence of "enemy hunting", and that the investigation continued. On October 23, 2015, the Justice Department declared that no criminal charges would be filed. On September 8, 2017, the Trump Justice Department declined to reopen the criminal investigation into Lois Lerner, a central figure in the controversy.[1]

In late September 2017, an exhaustive report by the Treasury Department's Inspector General found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.[2][3] " [0]

> ... and now Trump asked the Ukrainians to "take care of" Biden. I don't think he's a great president, but anyone calling him satan has an agenda that involves some law-breaking, possibly "light" treason.

Please elaborate on this agenda, seeing as he's the one openly and admittedly breaking (at least in case of anyone not a sitting president) laws.

> Reality: His tweets are direct thoughts from his head, no one sees them before they're sent out and he doesn't even look them over for spelling and grammar mistakes.

Either he's ignorant of the effects [1] and thus an idiot, or he's aware and rationally acting on said information. Pick one. If he's aware and not wanting to act unethically, he wouldn't keep tweeting the same way.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volfefe_index

For the second point, can you differentiate how much of the impact was from the diverse signals generated from the trade war and the impeachment process, and how much of the impact was from his tweets alone? The fact is that the news from the trade war and impeachment process create signals even without his tweets, his tweets only changes the timing of the signals (or not).
That is assuming that he only tweets when there already are external signals, which (I hope) we can agree he doesn't.

Timings should be measurable too though.

What I am says is that if he does not tweet, the news will come out anyway. In this case he only changes the timing.

If the news is already out, his tweet doesn't even change the timing.

> At least one of those is clear propaganda talking points you picked up from less-than ingenuous sources:

And yet a key HDD seems to have failed, Which magically was the only source of all email about this.

I'm not really interested in arguing about this. we could go point for point all week. But the "exhaustive report" is mostly before Obama was president, so it's not surprising that it found both sides were targets. It would be more interesting and conclusive if from 2010-2016 no wrongdoing was found. Wonder why in 2017 they choose to look from 2004 until only 2013....

Also calling my talking points less-than ingenuous while quoting obviously controversial wikipedia articles is not a good look. (especially when we know that both sides use wiki to sow falsehoods).

> Please elaborate on this agenda, seeing as he's the one openly and admittedly breaking (at least in case of anyone not a sitting president) laws.

Seeking to depose the president because you don't like him is treasonous. So far the drafted AoI don't contain anything that 99% of objective people would consider impeachable.

> Either he's ignorant of the effects [1] and thus an idiot, or he's aware and rationally acting on said information. Pick one.

Easy, he's ignorant. Don't think that makes him an idiot, he's just human. His tweeting pattern hasn't changed much since he got elected. The content is even fairly similar. Is Elon an idiot? Better yet, are all twitter users idiots? they enjoy sharing their ideas online they don't think past the fact that what they consider a joke or insignificant is seen as market moving by others. I think we can all agree that Musk doesn't make the best choices when it comes to twitter but we can also agree that he's far from a fool.

For better or worse most people treat twitter as their personal-public diary and no one is considering the consequences of what they write in their diary.

Your need to seek malice speaks volumes about your ability to be objective about this.

I don't plan on responding to you anymore because I hate this type of argument. you are definitely not gonna be moved and are probably stewing right now at all my alt-facts and "fake news" and I spend all day reading the talking points you're throwing at me from CNN, NPR, vox and already have my responses queued up. Let's just agree that you think OMB and I think he's more of the same.