Something similar went to court! You can probably google the details and find the actual case.

Guy works at a rail yard, he notices that they are spending a bunch of time doing an inventory of equipment and then a bunch of guys in suits keep visiting. He assumes someone is buying the company, so loads up on stock and so does his family.

Company gets acquired and the SEC charges him with insider trading. I believe he was convicted (nope, went to jury trial), but appealed and won.

His argument was he had no more access to this information than the general public would (say from watching the yard outside the gate).

Edit: found it!

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/two-thoughts-about-the-jur...

Acquitted after a jury trial.

> ... then a bunch of guys in suits keep visiting.

I bet it’d be easy to train an image tracking model to find this off satellite imagery.

Welcome to the wonderful world of ‘alternative data’

You can similarly track certain flights to certain places.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/30/a-corporate-jet-revealed-buf...

There was a bunch of analysis over on /r/wallstreetbets a while back based on satellite imagery of roads in China, using them to estimate coronavirus recovery levels for factories there.

Where do you get up to date satellite imagery?

https://www.planet.com/ has 3-5 meter resolution satellite images updated daily for almost all the land surface in the world. Their business model is to launch many lower power and resolution satellite with a few year life rather than launching a few super big and expensive satellite.

Clients can then get historical imagery of a target location to track daily developments (for things like deforestation, crop health, etc.).

That's quite different than someone who doesn't work for a company observing something about their product.

Matt Levine talks a lot about insider trading, and the emphasis he always puts on it is about theft. Insider trading, in the US, isn’t about trading on uncommon knowledge or inferences. That’s actually many professional traders job: information arbitrage. It’s about trading on information that is owned by your employer. Your responsibility as an employee or executive is to the company and using inside corporate information for personal gain rather than corporate gain is a form of theft. Here’s his piece on the distinction between thinking about insider trading as being about fairness vs theft.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/a...

However, he also writes about how, say, being a golf buddy of an insider has been argued to somehow be a "position of trust" that can be betrayed by using inside information. It sounds like there is a nebulous area that you don't want to get caught up in, if you are the sort to pal around with executives and such. Winning after years in court, on appeal, could easily be a pyrrhic victory.

There's a reason he says don't take anything as legal advice.

Could you please try to post direct links, rather than AMP links which are privacy-violating?

A Javascript warning when using AMP links in a post could help.

I actually prefer to post amp links for paywalled articles. It’s the only legal way around the paywall.

How about you're a FAAMG or any other big data harvester and you analyse this data from millions of businesses for insider trading and other business opportunities? If you don't overplay your hand no one will find out, competitive advantage galore.

Facebook were accused of exactly this in one line of questioning to Zuckerberg during last week's congressional hearing. Though I'm not sure if the implication was that they had done something illegal, or that they had done something which ought to be illegal.

Zuckerberg first said he wasn't aware of the situation being referred to (an old free VPN app that FB allegedly acquired to use for data harvesting); and then later asked to correct his testimony saying something along the lines of that he does remember, but the name of the app used (in the question) wasn't familiar to him so he had needed his memory jogged (presumably by an off-camera lawyer while he was muted).

I wondered whether it was intentional - claim ignorance to avoid the hard questions then fix the record later to avoid perjury while also avoiding follow up questions...

Edit: since parent wrote "data from millions of businesses" I should clarify that I don't have knowledge of what data FB are accused of harvesting, I think the idea was that it was data from consumers giving them a competitive advantage in considering what companies to acquire.

Facebook wasn't buying and selling stock in public companies they gathered data on, and additionally didn't have a contractual arrangement with those companies to keep data about traffic to them private.

There's plenty of precedent for this kind of behavior: Comscore buys traffic data from ISPs and sells the aggregated insights. Supermarkets count sales and create in-house brands to compete with the vendors they sell products for.

I think "insider" has an actual, statutory, legal definition, and it would not include random bystanders or observers. Of course, I'm not a lawyer and my comment is not intended to be legal advice.

What an insider is is all case law and precedent, not legislation.

You could analyze trading patterns, discover that insider trading is almost certainly taking place, trade on that, and you wouldn't be committing insider trading yourself. Your own deductions are fair game.