Not OP, but Matt Levine "wrote about me" [0]. I made a Matt Levine insider trading game [1]. It was inspired by a Matt Levine article [2] where he mentioned how some professional traders had access to early earnings but even with that data, they were still highly inconsistent in their trade performance. The point was stock prices are notoriously difficult to predict even with early earnings.

So I made this app where you get early earnings and a graph of prior stock prices and you try to guess one of two paths (they were inverse of each other). Even with all of those myself (and Matt Levine) were correct about 50% of the time.

I emailed him and he actually told me he was worse than 50% , which seems like a good thing because then you could just do opposite of your initial guess and have a profitable strategy. He was very nice in his correspondence, although he didn't give me a heads up saying he was going to blast it out. It's a static site [3] so it wasn't a problem, nor do I really care too much. But it gave me the ultimate flex when another super-fan at work spotted it and spammed it out.

From the article.

> Elsewhere here is “Matt Levine’s Insider Trading Game,” though I actually have nothing to do with it.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-16/we-kep...

[1] https://insider-trading-game.netlify.app/

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-26/knowin...

[3] https://github.com/breeko/stox

This is a very cool app, but one thing I'm noticing is that you aren't providing any numbers about expectations (expected earnings/share, etc). Stock prices are forward projections, so it's less about how much money made/lost and more about how much money made/lost beyond current expectations. And this is certainly information a real insider trader would have.

Perhaps that would improve players results?

Thats funny because that was the exact comment Matt Levine made in our email correspondence. I mentioned I'd be happy to include it if he got me a Bloomberg api subscription, but no luck!

My guess would be that expectations wouldn't help much. The analysts at banks that provide estimates are relatively conservative (don't want to stick out from the crowd too much). For instance, it's much better to be way off from actual as compared to other analyst estimates. Because you can always say everyone else believed the same thing as an excuse. If you're way off from others and you happen to be wrong, then thats more embarrassing.

The analysts also rely on internal estimates pretty heavily, and companies aren't dumb, so they usually downplay expectations. So much so that the majority of companies beat their own estimates (over 70% of the time). So I think these numbers are gamed and without being a sophisticated practitioner, they wouldn't help IMO

[0] https://insight.factset.com/record-performance-vs.-eps-estim...

Cool game! I was able to get over 65% by looking at just the year, that should be hidden in the guessing phase.

Securities fraud. I have linked it below. There are a few other articles where I am mentioned in passing or via hyperlink.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-05-22/fitbit...

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20927197

> Also forfeiture doesn't account for the fact that you may have paid capital gains tax. I feel like they really shafted me on that one.

As someone also charged but not convicted, I learned hypothetically you also don't get to account for expenses if you lose. Meaning you could run a $10 billion gross revenue drug empire, it costs $9.9 billion to run so you walk away with $100m and you still have to pay $10 billion in forfeiture.

If the most you could lose is whatever margin you made, that wouldn't be much of an incentive to not do that in the first place and it would be quite a broken system.

What I wrote about is forfeiture which doesn't include criminal penalties. Most of the American (which I am not) federal press releases I read about have a maximum $250,000 fine per count.

Here is a random press release from justice.gov https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/six-additional-individuals-in...

>The Sherman Act offense charged carries a statutory maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine for individuals. The maximum fine may be increased to twice the gain derived from the crime or twice the loss suffered by victims if either amount is greater than $1 million. The false statements offense charged carries a statutory maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine. The obstruction of justice offense charged carries a statutory maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.

These fines are on top of the forfeiture so if the person in this article earned $1 million gross, $100k net they would have to repay on a guilty finding $1 million + say $500k in fines = $1.5m when they only "earned" $100k.

That makes sense, thanks for educating me :)

Correct. :-(

Did it really happen as he describes it? I.e. he wrote about a fraud scheme and you went "hey good idea I'm gonna do that too"? Or was there more to it? :-)

Feel free to not respond or anything, not trying to get you to incriminate yourself or whatever, I'm just nosy.

There's more to it than just reading an article and going for it. I also feel like I got nailed harder because there was a second person that they were trying to get me to reveal. That was not possible because of encrypted messaging. They incorrectly believed it was someone who I knew it was not.

To be fair, everything is securities fraud

It sucks that you are being downvoted for making a reference to one of Matt's recurring jokes