[sschueller]

No surprise there as she is one of the ones that has made a lot of money on trades. Especially her husband who seem to have a sixth sense on when to trade...

Maybe an alright ban isn't "fair" but then the SEC should have the power to look very closely at possible insider trading. This also include insights into closed hearings that produced information that was traded on.

However, a ban would be so much easier, yet we all know their spouses/friends will do the trades instead.

I guess the only real solution would be term limits making this a temporary thing.

[olyjohn]

Every job comes with it's drawbacks. It's perfectly fair that they should not be able to profit off of their decisions that are supposed to be made for the people they represent.

You know the money is influencing their politics. That much should be taken away as much as possible.

What's not fair is that the rest of us don't get the same information as them, and can't profit the same way they do.

[SteveNuts]

Stupid question, but is it still considered insider trading if the information gleaned is not directly from a company insider?

I mean, if a senator gets wind of upcoming legislation that may affect a specific company or sector, and they act on that, it's not insider information coming from someone within the affected company, so is that still considered insider?

[xboxnolifes]

I'd argue the knowledge of upcoming legislation itself is the insider information. It's not insider as in "inside the company's organization" but it is insider as in "inside the legislation organization". When it's your job to make decisions that can impact entire economic sectors, a lot of what you touch would be considered far more powerful insider information than most things that are considered insider information in a company.

Maybe it doesn't fall under current definitions of insider information (I'm not sure), but maybe it should.

[vlod]

I'm fairly certain it is. The way to think about it, do you have knowledge which isn't in the public domain which would give you an unfair trading advantage.

Here's some examples:

- In a closed door US senate committee, they are planning to stop all government vehicles from using fossil fuels. Stock of oil companies will mostly move.

- In a closed door US senate committee, they have decided to buy $50B of a vaccine from pharma provider FOO. Stock of FOO will likely move.

[troydavis]

> The way to think about it, do you have knowledge which isn't in the public domain which would give you an unfair trading advantage.

Matt Levine does a good job of explaining why that’s not the way to think about it: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-04-01/anothe...

As he’s stated many times, it’s about theft, not fairness. (Of course, there may be an argument that these examples are theft or a breach of trust or confidence.)