[waylandsmithers]

My own personal anecdote:

I worked for a company that produced reports for insurance adjusters. Sometimes the reports were small enough to take an hour, and some large enough to take a week to produce.

For some reason the company was obsessed with the "month-end" cycle- people on the last day of the month would work overtime until midnight and occasionally skip usual quality control checks to get things out the door. (And then take the next day off or come in at noon or whatever.)

For reasons I will never understand, with three days left in the month a certain director would spend the whole day running around with a spreadsheet of all the reports that were open and ask people for a red/yellow/green estimate of whether they would be done. The next day and the next he'd repeat the process to get his most accurate estimate of the monthly revenue.

Then two days later, the controller would just hand him the actual revenue numbers for the month ended.

[solveit]

Perhaps an insider trader trying to outpace all the other insider traders?