You don't screw with the Rat. Disney administrative assistant Bonnie Jean Hoxie and her boyfriend Yonni Sebbag found that out the hard way Wednesday when they were arrested for attempting to sell Disney's quarterly results to several hedge funds before the numbers were released. So amateur were their attempts at insider trading that a number of hedge funds reported them to the Feds, who then set up a sting operation.
These two really had no clue. They didn't even know what to charge for the information, leaving that up to the Feds posing as hedge fund managers. Taking a page out of the Nigerian scammers book, they handled everything through anonymous email accounts. However bad they were at setting up an insider trading scheme, they did actually deliver the goods. According to the SEC complaint, Sebbag sent a 107-page confidential document to the undercover hedgies which disclosed detailed quarterly information including earnings four days prior to the public release.
The really good news here is that many of the hedge funds they approached reported these dopes to the regulators. What makes that remarkable is that this wasn't a one-off attempt. Hoxie and Sebbag were attempting to establish a long term relationship with the funds, providing them inside information every quarter. That must have been a significant temptation for some.
Am I grasping at straws to think that we may have turned some ethical corner on the back side of the crisis? Let's face it, Raj wouldn't have hesitated to take the info.
This whole thing reminds me of a Mickey Mouse joke. Mickey and Minnie appear in divorce court and the judge asks Mickey to approach the bench.
Judge: Mr. Mouse, am I to understand that you are petitioning for divorce on the grounds of incurable insanity?
Mickey (surprised): What? No! I didn't say she was crazy. I said she was fucking Goofy!
Have a great weekend guys.
In the middle east, insider information is easy to attain and no one prosecutes anyone for its use. I believe the biggest case was in Saudi Arabia when the defendant was fined about $1000, lord knows how much he made in the first place. Since starting here, I think I got 3 tips..Can't act on them because I can't be bothered opening a GCC brokerage account..
EDIT - I'm not in or from Saudi Arabia.
I can't imagine just how much insider information would be passed around in a city like Jakarta, considering that even the anti corruption commission was found to be corrupt. I wouldn't have the confidence to trade any securities on the IDX.
Out of every 10,000 people that trade on insider information, MAYBE one will get caught. The SEC is pathetic, it relies on news agencies to report on the most successful HF managers, and they pick managers out of that list to investigate and eventually find a case. That's why back in the dark days of the recession when it was actually plausible that some newspapers would go out of business, the SEC lobbied the gov't to subsidize newspapers. True story.
There is nothing morally wrong with insider trading, IMO. You are not committing any type of fraud, you aren't hurting anybody else, you are just getting an upper hand on the rest of the market. And what the hell is wrong with that? According to these God-damned liberals and "progressives" nowadays, the world is supposed to be fair for everyone and no one is supposed to get ahead. Smells like communism to me. Ok I'm done ranting.
"If you're not on the inside, you're on the outside." - Gordon Gekko
The thing is that hedge funds would have been glad to take inside information if these two idiots weren't running such a "mickey mouse" operation so to speak. This had "amateur hour / guaranteed to get caught" written all over it.
"What's all this business about not wearing the purity rings, huh?"
Martha Stewart was caught up and jailed for the very same reasons. It is hard to blindly believe whatever happens in the market is absolutely the outcome triggered by the famous invisible hand.
Honestly, these guys were so incompetent that the hedge funds probably assumed it was the SEC attempting to run a sting operation
what makes them think they could get away with it?
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