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Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by 0_____0 on Thursday June 10, 2021 @11:28PM (#27468945)
Would love to see the same penalties applied to members of congress who used info from private briefings at the start of the coronavirus pandemic to make stock trades. :|
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by DevKoala on Thursday June 10, 2021 @11:40PM (#27469027)
This 100%. For example, Nancy Pelosi should be named the Wolf of Wall Street. Look at that amazing trade she made on cyber security companies right before the hacks on the government were announced.

Source: https://housestockwatcher.com/summary_by_rep/Hon.%20Nancy%20...

Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by lilyball on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:08AM (#27469186)
Nancy Pelosi’s story is her husband does the stock trading without her involvement (or even her knowledge prior to her regular reports to Congress about trading activity). If true (and assuming she’s not giving privileged info to her husband), that means no insider trading.

Having said that, I really think Congresspeople should be prohibited from trading in individual stocks entirely, and restricted to just investing in index funds, if for no other reason than the PR problem of congresspeople appearing to profit off of their position.

Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by analog31 on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:26AM (#27469284)
I'd like to see them required to make their portfolios open to the public in real time. That way, the rest of us could invest in an index fund based on congressional investments, and share in their success.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by ocdtrekkie on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:31AM (#27469312)
That's heavily assuming Congresspeople are successful at investing. Assuming insider trading is still illegal for Congresspeople, you will have a hard time picking between "people not insider trading, good at picking stocks though", "people not insider trading, bad at picking stocks", "people who are insider trading, and actually good at it", and "people who are insider trading, but still make terrible choices".

Good luck.

Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by ashtonkem on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:36AM (#27469340)
Most traders suck at trading, if a congress person with no financial history starts beating the market, I’d bet a lot that they’re cheating.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by loopz on Friday June 11, 2021 @01:16AM (#27469553)
If they're shorting or just holding for a short time it's trading. Otherwise long-term positions are investments.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by nzrf on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:18AM (#27469243)
Wish we could see something like that happen, but you are going to need some representatives to vote against their best interest. Kind of like why run off voting will never see the light of day.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by gnopgnip on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:34AM (#27469332)
The voted to pass the STOCK act, requiring disclosing these trades within ~30 days
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by ycombobreaker on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:50AM (#27469409)
30 days? That's some bullshit. Legislators trading based on closed-doors meetings related to "national security" (covid briefings) or even pending market-moving legislation should be on par with insider trading. It's not, and they will never collectively vote against their interests, to use their information for personal gain.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by gnopgnip on Saturday June 12, 2021 @04:07AM (#27482620)
That is all on the table. The SEC can convict federal government employees of securities fraud for trading on this type of insider info
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by rorykoehler on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:36AM (#27469339)
Ye, that is just a ridiculous excuse. I agree that the option too be tempted should also be removed.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by User23 on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:50AM (#27469411)
I’m under the impression that representatives are legally incapable of insider trading. Being in the congress privileges them to use the information they hear during speech and debate as they see fit.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by alexatalktome on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:01AM (#27469140)
Can you name the companies and a source? I recall a few weeks ago there was a HN post about congressman but I didn’t recall seeing cyber security in the list.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by camjohnson26 on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:18AM (#27469245)
They made a killing on Tesla calls for one, million dollar investment. https://newsthud.com/disclosure-fillings-reveal-pelosi-purch...
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by birken on Friday June 11, 2021 @01:02AM (#27469474)
It looks like her TSLA stock is down from when she purchased it, because there is no corresponding sale and TSLA is trading for less than it was on 12/21/2020 (and has been for the last month... the disclosure period for trades). So instead of purchasing an index fund, which would be up 10% since 12/21/20, she purchased TSLA which is down ~5%.

So this trade underperformed the market by 15%, which seems like it is a horrible trade. Am I missing something? Why did you say she made a killing?

Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by DevKoala on Friday June 11, 2021 @01:30AM (#27469651)
They didn’t buy stock, they bought option calls which use leverage to profit massively of small movements in the ticker. They are incredibly risky, and Nancy’s husband bet between 500k and $1M on them, which means that if the trade had gone sour, they could have lost that immediately. That’s WallStreetBets levels of gambling, and a strange behavior for an otherwise safe trader.

Also, AFAIK there has been no update on whether those calls are still open or closed. They could have sold the covered calls already at a massive profit before the stock started to tank.

Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by DevKoala on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:18AM (#27469239)
https://housestockwatcher.com/summary_by_rep/Hon.%20Nancy%20...

Crowdstrike on September of 2020. I remember I went for it too, and it paid really well once the news the government had been hacked came out.

Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by tessierashpool on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:23AM (#27469270)
you changed the subject, though, or at least the target. parent comment was about David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, the two GOP senators who profited off the pandemic; this post redirects the topic, and the outrage, to Nancy Pelosi.

it’s 100% legit to say that any Congressperson who trades stocks unethically should be criticized. but when I saw a deft change of target like this, I was not at all surprised to find you defending Trump in your post history.

I’m partisan too, but let’s keep it above board.

Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by fighterpilot on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:29AM (#27469301)
Or when she or her husband longed TSLA calls a few days before Biden announced the government (Secret Service? Forgot exactly which part) will be buying EVs.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by epistasis on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:48AM (#27469401)
Lol, doesn't take insider trading to see that one coming...
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by fighterpilot on Friday June 11, 2021 @10:56AM (#27474252)
And it could also be insider trading. This was a market moving announcement (in TSLA) a few days after she bought.

There's plausible deniability for sure, it might've been coincidence, and I'm not denying that.

Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by leephillips on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:01AM (#27469138)
Before passage of the STOCK act in 2012, there was disagreement whether members of congress could be prosecuted for insider trading.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by AviationAtom on Thursday June 10, 2021 @11:31PM (#27468960)
They get special treatment
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by sneak on Thursday June 10, 2021 @11:42PM (#27469041)
Those private briefings likely did not contain nonpublic information, or especially nonpublic information about specific companies.

The pandemic seemed obvious in February; I know dozens (myself included) who bought masks and supplies long before the run on stores, long before even the USG was lying to people telling them not to wear masks (to preserve the supply). The briefings were around then. Were I a gambling man, I too would have shorted airlines then, and I wasn't in any of those private briefings.

The abuse is when they trade and then pass laws affecting the industries. A lot of kerfuffle has been around the covid briefings, but they didn't get anything an observant outsider couldn't see as well.

It has to be nonpublic information to be insider trading.

Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by brewdad on Thursday June 10, 2021 @11:57PM (#27469125)
There absolutely was nonpublic information. Probably not about individual companies but certainly about the degree of the looming impact to the global economy.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by lai-yin on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:03AM (#27469149)
You're overestimating what these private member briefings are really like.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by shawnz on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:03AM (#27469150)
What nonpublic information do congresspeople have about how pandemics might impact the global economy?
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by kaesar14 on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:21AM (#27469254)
What kind of information do you imagine the leadership of the most powerful military and intelligence organization in human history might have?
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by shawnz on Friday June 11, 2021 @07:28AM (#27471856)
If it was intelligence that any investor could have gathered themselves, that's not non-public. It doesn't matter that the government are the best investigators.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by kaesar14 on Friday June 11, 2021 @07:58PM (#27479975)
we don’t know what was said at the briefing.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by klyrs on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:31AM (#27469311)
Insight into multiple companies' preparedness heading into a pandemic would make it easy to pick winners and losers
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by shawnz on Friday June 11, 2021 @07:26AM (#27471834)
What non-public information about companies' preparedness would they have? Couldn't any investor research a company's pandemic preparedness? What special information about that does Congress have access to that we don't?
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by joshribakoff on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:20AM (#27469253)
Considering the pandemic became a pandemic in March and they sold stocks in February, your question reads as loaded.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by ycombobreaker on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:59AM (#27469459)
The pandemic was definitely a "thing" through all of February, just binned as something that happens to Other People. February 24th was when US stock markets started to really react, and it was maybe 2 weeks until major US cities were making decisions like schooling from home.

There was plenty of opportunity through January and February for "prescient" trading decisions. The main decisions in question are those executed by US legislators immediately following a national security briefing. I'm not saying it's illegal, it's not; but they're assholes for selling after the briefing and still deliberately telegraphing otherwise.

Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by jandrewrogers on Friday June 11, 2021 @01:10AM (#27469516)
I hedged my portfolio in January. You didn’t need a declaration of pandemic by the WHO to see the risk — that’s a trailing indicator. I exited my initial hedges in mid-March.

Which isn’t to defend or justify insider trading by Congress. There were intelligence analysis reports floating around Washington DC in 2019, so it was a known risk. But you didn’t need to be a beltway insider to see that possibility when insuring against that risk was very cheap.

Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by sneak on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:34AM (#27469334)
It was becoming fairly obvious by February even to people outside of Congress (such as myself) that a global pandemic was likely impending. I didn't attend any secret briefings.

What nonpublic information about a publicly traded company do you think they received?

Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by joshribakoff on Friday June 11, 2021 @02:05AM (#27469871)
Representatives of the US government sold stocks, meanwhile many Americans only received “it’s the flu”, “this will be over in a few months guaranteed”. I didn’t assert anyone received info about a company. I’m only pointing out to the parent comments author that stocks were being dumped by congress prior to there being a pandemic. I don’t know what information was given in a secret report, if I did, it wouldn’t be a secret.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by shawnz on Friday June 11, 2021 @09:17AM (#27472889)
It doesn't matter what messages laypeople received from the media. All that matters is if those laypeople were capable of discovering the same facts which congresspeople had access to. Congresspeople were also subject to those messages in the media which downplayed the severity of the virus, and many laypeople also sold stocks in February despite the media opinion.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by sneak on Friday June 11, 2021 @02:22PM (#27476793)
You seem smart, and if you published an email address in your profile, other smart people who want to connect and discuss things with you could send you email. :)

PS: email me

Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by kaesar14 on Thursday June 10, 2021 @11:44PM (#27469058)
The stock market didn’t start to decline until Mid March so by definition the majority of “betting men” were still not sure the pandemic would have as far reaching of effects they did. It’s highly suspicious that US Congressmen did after getting briefs that were presumably not public information.
Re:Husband of Amazon employee sentenced to prison for inside... by sneak on Friday June 11, 2021 @12:36AM (#27469338)
> The stock market didn’t start to decline until Mid March so by definition the majority of “betting men” were still not sure the pandemic would have as far reaching of effects they did.

Indeed, there is a bell curve of "wait-and-see-what-the-others-do".

https://www.epsilontheory.com/sheep-logic/