[watwut]

I think it genuinely does not matter whether it is legal or not. No one will prosecute them. Legal system was berarely capable of prosecuting rich people crimes and generally unwilling to do so. And the capable parts were dismantled last year.

It would take years to rebuild them. And even if they do by some miracle, next republican president will issue pardons like Trump did.

This sort of activity is illegal only in theory.

[JasonADrury]

At least in the US, you are highly likely to be prosecuted if you engage in any profitable insider trading. Those patterns get automatically flagged and you will be investigated.

[watwut]

Insider trading was notoriously difficult to prosecute even when the law trying. It involves a lot of grey areas and is not something you can just easily automatically flag. We kind of know it is going on, because people in positions to have insider information are disproportionally "winning" those bets, but that all that goes about it.

And current administration removed people and groups capable to handle difficult convoluted white collar cases, so the best bet is that law enforcement will ignore these and will go only after simple low level frauds - because that is all they are competent to do now.

[JasonADrury]

I don't think this is true. A lot of crime happens, most criminals don't get caught.

> It involves a lot of grey areas and is not something you can just easily automatically flag.

Successful, high confidence trades by traders who do not make them frequently are trivial to detect statistically. There exist automated systems which detect this. It's extremely difficult to make highly profitable trades based on insider information without making abnormally confident trades.

I suppose a big fund that frequently makes high confidence bets based on legitimate, deep, research could theoretically hide such activity, but I don't see that as a ver realistic option.

>so the best bet is that law enforcement will ignore these and will go only after simple low level frauds - because that is all they are competent to do now.

Insider trading is often one of the simplest white collar crimes to pursue, and it's just good PR because the public always likes it when the feds are going after rich corporate types.

The reason it's so simple is because you can automatically get a very high-confidence list of targets who are likely engaged in insider trading, it's also feasible to link many of the traders to insiders in an automated manner using tools like accurint. Even doing this manually makes your life really easy, you start by doing things like checking who each of these individuals follows on social media.

A very sophisticated operation could hide this better, but any highly lucrative trades will fundamentally stand out. Any particularly profitable insider trading will be detected and eventually investigated.

>We kind of know it is going on, because people in positions to have insider information are disproportionally "winning" those bets, but that all that goes about it.

This sentence kind of suggests to me that you might be thinking of some atypical case of insider trading, perhaps involving politicians rather than corporate insiders?

[watwut]

What you are saying is that it is possible to catch the most blatant and frequent inside traders. Insider information does not have to be "frequent" to be profitable "insider information" situation.

Which is specifically unlikely to cover senate people or even most people having access to inside information in this or that special circumstances.

> This sentence kind of suggests to me that you might be thinking of some atypical case of insider trading, perhaps involving politicians rather than corporate insiders?

The OP specified "members of the US Congress" as his group of interest. However, I think that yours "it is atypical to be engaged in insider trading that does not involve high frequency of trades" is just incorrect.

[JasonADrury]

You're completely misunderstanding me.

You don't have to be a frequent trader to make a lot of money insider trading, you do have to make very high confidence (i.e. risky) trades though. A single one of those will stand out, not the frequency. Unless you're a habitual options trader or something, such trades will instantly be a huge red flag.

>The OP specified "members of the US Congress" as his group of interest. However, I think that yours "it is atypical to be engaged in insider trading that does not involve high frequency of trades" is just incorrect.

My bad, I missed that. I suspect it's inherently harder to investigate members of congress for anything, but I also suspect that there's far less illegal insider trading happening by members of congress than people often suggest. I'm not sure there's really any very good evidence that congresspeople are beating the market, someone tried to look at the numbers here https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/congressional-insider-tra...