[jedberg]

Of course not, because you learned the information yourself as an outsider.

Just like the hedge funds that pay for satellite images of all of the WalMart parking lots in the country and count the cars to estimate year over year sales. It's information they have that no one else does, but they didn't get it from an insider.

[pcthrowaway]

The real reason Walmart allows car campers to sleep in their parking lots...

[ehsankia]

Exactly. It's literally called "insider trading". There's nothing "insider" about an customer discovering something about the company's product while using it. The source of the information was not from "inside" the company.

[francisofascii]

But the customer was literally “inside” the problematic plane. :)

[Detrytus]

But the plane is owned by the airline, not the manufacturer, so they are inside a Boeing, but they are not a Boeing insider.

[nmfisher]

Don't be so quick to assume. In law school in Australia (20+ years ago), they specifically covered this point: third-party/outsider could not legally trade on information that wasn't conceivably available to the wider public (there were more specifics, but that was the gist).

Buying puts inside the plane may very well contravene that law, because there's only a couple of hundred people who theoretically had access to that information. Once it was radioed back to ATC, then it's actually available to the public (irrespective of who is actually listening, much like your satellite imagery).

I'm not saying that's the law in the USA (or that it's still even the law in Australia), but "that's how the law should operate" isn't the same as "that's how the law does operate".

[permo-w]

this seems really obvious. you're not an insider if you're ... not an insider? how is this question even being considered

[mixdup]

You can still be guilty of insider trading and not be an insider. If you get inside information from an insider and trade on it, even though you are not an insider or even if you didn't know the person you got it from was an insider, you are still in violation of the law in the US