An inside trader in the UK was also shown to be exchanging information with Bloomberg News's reporters:<p><a href="https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-mystery-millionaire-who-haunted-london-s-insider-trading-trial-1.1281860" rel="nofollow">https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-mystery-millionaire-who-haun...</a><p>What's not being said here is that for the trader to have timed his bets so precisely, the reporter would have had to tell him <i>when</i> the story was coming out.<p>The anonymous sources on Bloomberg M&A scoops all have insider information one way or the other (think "provider of professional services in the deal space"), otherwise they would have nothing to say. While many of them are not stupid enough to trade on that information, nearly all of them get some kind of benefit from it, usually in the form of two-way information exchange with the reporter. Since they work on deals, they want to know about deals, because their livelihoods depend on deal flow.<p>VCs know this dynamic well, but they are far less regulated, because they primarily work with private companies, not public ones.
This seems like a weasally headline to me.<p>"Shows ties to Bloomberg News" makes it sound like Peltz was conspiring together with the Bloomberg journalist.<p>When what's alleged is simply that Peltz was feeding the Bloomberg journalist legitimately publishable scoops.<p>Peltz is rightly accused of insider trading. But Bloomberg appears to have done nothing wrong whatsoever.
Honestly, who thinks they can get away with moronically obvious insider trading like this? "Oh, I know, I'll take large positions right before this reporter publishes MNPI, and I'll do it five times". Obviously you are going to get caught!
What exactly is insider trading?
Last year, if I remember correctly, Facebook released “Messenger Rooms” and it tanked Zoom stock quite a bit when they announced this.
If you were A Facebook engineer and loaded up on ZM puts just before the announcement, would that be an insider trading? With the right ZM puts you would be able to profit immensely.
This article explicitly states for one case it describes that the indicted trader received the insider information from a third party, not the journalist.<p>So it seems the flow of information was from him to the journalist, not the other way around. The purpose would be to get the news out there fast after buying into the stock, as otherwise it may take months for it to be released the normal way or, in some cases such as mergers not yet finalized, to fall through completely.<p>As such, the journalist wouldn’t have done anything wrong. Receiving and publishing inside information is their job, and as long as the information is accurate it isn’t their job to make up for a lack of secrecy on the company’s part. Since the information was already circulating among unauthorized traders, making it public actually serves to level the playing field and prevent further harm.
While I understand that insider training is illegal, I do find it pretty ironic that part of the "value prop" of a Bloomberg Terminal is that you pay money to get access to market information before everyone else does.
I wonder how much insider trading really happens, even somewhat innocently.
Someone who isn't me (SWIM) was once upon a time casually talking to his colleague (who has insider info) about their company stock. SWIM wanted to sell some of his shares before earning report as they often tanked. Colleague said that the numbers will be good as they want to make the new CEO to look good. SWIM kept his stock past the ER and indeed it mooned.
I think this may be insider trading, but also it may be happening all the time everywhere, most of the time unintentionally...
He could have avoided being indicted just by making the trades immediately after the publication of the news.<p>So he could have been ready with his stock, amount and direction (buy vs. sell), and then do it immediately upon the publication, still giving him a time edge while having plausible deniability by claiming that he acted in public news.
It seems ethically dubious to publicly name a Bloomberg reporter based <i>only</i> on circumstantial evidence.<p>Don’t get me wrong, it is awfully suspicious that the stories’ timestamps match closely. But I wonder if there’s other info they have that links the reporter to Peltz.
direct link to the indictment (also in the article):<p><a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/press-release/file/1379176/download" rel="nofollow">https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/press-release/file/1379176...</a><p>I was mostly curious about details regarding<p>> ...and also communicated via the use of smartphone applications with end-to-end encryption<p>but there aren't many that I can tell.
This is huge.<p>Insider trading is a crime, Bloomberg is a institution.<p>This is another thread pulled from the weave of the organised criminal network known as "the Financial System"<p>Another brick in the wall....
The only kind of insider information that you get you in trouble is the one done by (relatively) small operators in the market. If, on the other hand, you talk to directors in a company and, based on the insider knowledge you learn from them about the business, make a large investment, then you're called a smart and sophisticated investor (the biggest example is Warren Buffet).