| Here's the deal, since this issue comes up regularly in Hacker News comments: It is 'not illegal' to time an announcement to benefit yourself if you have a 10b5-1 plan in place that automatically sells your stock on a fixed schedule. It's 'not illegal' in the sense that as long as you don't admit you did it, there's really no way to prove it and there's no legal framework for prosecuting you anyway. Lawyers call it 'disclosure timing' and it's one of those often-whispered-about loopholes for the rich. No one admits to disclosure timing, but we all know that it is happening. We know this because on average trades made under 10b5-1 plans get better returns than trades not made under those plans. [1] The law is full of ways for rich people to get richer if they have good lawyers. This is one of them. There's not much incentive to change it either - it is hard to prove, it is complex to explain to the public, and the kinds of people that benefit from it are the kinds of people in power. One of the suggested routes to make the market more fair is to require those with 10b5-1 plans to make their scheduled trade dates public. This would at least give the market at way to guess at disclosure timing too. But again, there's no real political incentive to do this right now. [1] https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2016/03/30/the-legality-... NB: I'm not a lawyer, so obviously don't do anything based on this dumb internet comment. |