Re:Equifax Stock Sales Are the Focus of U.S. Criminal Probe
by 1mike12 on Monday September 18, 2017 @04:01PM
(#15279006)
It's not as if there's an amount X you can sell less of where it's totally fine, but if you go over, you're in trouble. Nobody would be dumb enough to sell their entire position, but at the same time, if you did have insider knowledge, you wouldn't want to have all your position tank. So what do you do? You could go a little bit in the middle and claim ignorance. Trading based off of insider knowledge is illegal regardless of the amount of trades, but in practice obviously the government only chases after egregious cases.
Re:Equifax Stock Sales Are the Focus of U.S. Criminal Probe
by oconnor663 on Monday September 18, 2017 @04:04PM
(#15279034)
I think the idea of the question is, if you're talking about the difference between losing 50% of your value (doing nothing), and losing 49% of your value (making a small illegal trade), would it make sense to expose yourself to criminal liability for that 1%, even if that 1% represents a lot of money in absolute terms?
I agree that the timing of these sales looks really bad. However, I've heard that these guys are executives with an enormous amount of stock and the sales were for a small percentage of their overall stake. If they were intentionally breaking the law to avoid losses, wouldn't they sell all or most if it? Was most of their stock not vested and they just dumped what already vested? Or is the claim that it was a small percentage of their stock not true?