Dupe of <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16584980" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16584980</a>
"Three Equifax Inc. senior executives -- Chief Financial Officer John Gamble, and unit presidents Joseph Loughran and Rodolfo Ploder -- sold shares worth almost $1.8 million in the days after the company discovered the breach. Equifax has said those three executives had not been informed of the incident when they initiated the sales."<p>While I'm not sympathetic to the U.S. CIO named in this article, I find it somewhat dubious that none of the above executives knew anything. In any event, I wouldn't take Equifax's word for it. The finance dudes get a clean bill of health, and the tech guy gets thrown to the feds. Again, not that Ying deserves my sympathy either, but...
If you guessed that your employer may be in trouble and then sold stock, is that considered insider trading?<p>Let's say, you are in charge of security. The CEO is never interested in your work. One day, you got an invitation to meet with the CEO. You sold all your stock before you go to the meeting (based on a guess that something bad might have happened). Is that illegal? Is the meeting invite considered material non public information?
> Ying was invited to a mandatory conference call. While he didn’t initially join the call, one of his direct reports did, the SEC said.<p>He was trying to sell his stock and didn't wait an official trail of him knowing about it. It would be hard to deny knowing about it once he joined the conference call. Did I read that right? Because that's what it sounds like to me.<p>> “VERY large breach opportunity”<p>"opportunity" what does that even mean? Were they celebrating and planning on monetizing it? That kind of makes sense I guess. Since they get to charge people to freeze their credit, their stock has recovered and executive retired happily to Bahamas or wherever. It was an opportunity after all!
"Prosecutors say he searched on the internet for what might happen to Equifax stock when the news of the attack broke"<p>1) CIO should probably know the answer w/o searching.
2) CIO should probably know how to search w/o leaving evidence trail (incognito mode in a coffee shop on personal laptop for starters).
If insider trading laws didn't exist, would we have known that something was wrong more quickly? Are high-volume trades from executives public? It seems to me that insider trading laws mean people take every step to keep bad things about a company secret, which is not good for consumers.