[dataflow]

You completely missed the point. It had nothing to do with who is executing the trades.

>> If nothing else, doesn't it magnify the public's risk beyond whatever impact Buffet could have on his own?

I am saying that when you let others pull the same trick in addition to Buffet himself, they can now bring their own additional funds to play with -- meaning they can make more trades and cause even more damage than Buffet could inflict on his own. This clearly enlarges the blast radius and allows more harm to the public than Buffet could cause with his own funds. It is ludicrous to close your eyes and suggest the situation is no different, just like it is by suggesting that there's no difference between one country having nukes vs. N of them having them.

Heck, the fact that Warren Buffet is used as the example here instead of some random John Doe makes it clear how intentionally ridiculous the example is: for this to even pass the laugh test and obscure the reality of the situation, you have to pick one of richest people of all time, so that even aggregating a thousand other random strangers' funds together would still miss his purchasing power by multiple orders of magnitude.

Why don't you start with someone poor instead of Buffet, then add Buffet to the equation, then try to claim that bringing the billionaire into the equation makes no difference, rather than the other way around?

[eru]

> I am saying that when you let others pull the same trick in addition to Buffet himself, they can now bring their own additional funds to play with -- meaning they can make more trades and cause even more damage than Buffet could inflict on his own.

Buffett is not inflicting damage on anyone by trading on his intentions. Neither would anyone else.

Also: the typical 'insider' in insider trading cases has far less budget to bring to bear than the typical principal. Eg Warren Buffett (and Berkshire Hathaway) are richer than Warren Buffett's assistant.

Also: 'insider trading' is perfectly legal for commodities and foreign exchange, and the markets in these work perfectly well.

> Why don't you start with someone poor instead of Buffet, then add Buffet to the equation, then try to claim that bringing the billionaire into the equation makes no difference, rather than the other way around?

I'm very poor compared to Warren Buffett. If Warren Buffett wanted to trade on any information I held, I'm very sure we could work out a deal.