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by gimmeThaBeet 806 days ago
At this point it borders on cliche, but he broke at least like 4 of Matt Levine's (Not Legal Advice) Insider Trading Laws:

- Don't do it

- Don't do it by buying short-dated out-of-the-money call options on merger targets.

- Don't email or text about it.

- Don't do it in your [mother's] account.

2 comments

I hadn't heard of those, but that's brilliant.

The second one in particular just seems so obvious to me. Options are a case where you either "win or you lose everything", and even more you have to "win by a certain time". Options are kind of fun to gamble with, I've done it once, but the advantage of vanilla shares is that you can wait as long as you need to to "win". It doesn't provoke nearly as many red flags.

It’s important to note that when large option trades aren’t part of a hedging strategy, they almost certainly attract scrutiny from the SEC.
Wonder how the SEC sees the 99% of times people lose money on them, a la WSB
FINRA was an early adopter of AWS cloud. Here’s a case study from a full decade ago, 2014. https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/finra/

When I heard back then they stored every side of every trade without getting hacked, I figured the Fortune 500’s security concerns with moving data to the cloud were likely to melt away, for better or worse.

Losing money is the default state and nobody cares. Like gambling in Vegas. The House only notices when the money moves in the wrong direction.
Yes, lower leverage means fewer red flags... but more leverage means more money ;)
Options are just a way of stating a view on a distribution, you can structure trades to cap risk in exchange for lower payoff and so on.
https://lawsofinsidertrading.com/

(Matt Levin's Laws of Insider Trading from Bloomberg's Money Stuff)