insider trading

SEC Data Analysis in Insider Trading Investigations

By Daniel M. Hawke August 21, 2019 by renholding

Recent SEC enforcement actions charging senior lawyers at Apple and SeaWorld with insider trading provide reason to dust off company insider trading policies and assess whether updates or additional training are needed.  As sanctuaries for corporate America’s most valuable confidential …

Gibson Dunn Offers 2019 Mid-Year Securities Enforcement Update

By Mark K. Schonfeld and Amy Mayer July 24, 2019 by renholding

The first half of 2019 has seen a continuation of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s emphasis on protecting the interests of Main Street investors. Chairman Clayton reiterated these themes in his testimony in May before the Financial Services and General …

Fragmented Securities Regulation: Neglected Insider Trading in Stand-Alone Banks

By Sehwa Kim and Seil Kim July 17, 2019 by renholding

The financial regulatory structure in the U.S. is complex, consisting of multiple agencies with overlapping responsibilities. Regulators have raised concerns that regulatory fragmentation may undermine the stability and efficiency of the U.S. financial system (GAO 2016). In this paper, we …

Insider Trading As Fraud

By Zachary Gubler July 16, 2019 by renholding

U.S. Insider trading law is strange. Because Congress has never adopted a comprehensive statute on the subject, insider trading law is largely a species of federal common law. That’s not to say that the Supreme Court has nothing to go …

Political Connections and Insider Trading

By Thuong Harvison July 12, 2019 by renholding

The media, investors, and regulators often consider trading by corporate insiders to be a signal of firm value, given that insiders know their business better than do others. Although trading on material, non-public information can be illegal in the U.S., …

Price Revelation from Insider Trading: Evidence from Hacked Earnings News

By Pat Akey, Vincent Gregoire and Charles Martineau July 10, 2019 by renholding

Cyber risk is a major concern to corporations and investors.  Recent academic studies point out that firms suffer large negative returns when they disclose that they have suffered a data breach (e.g., Akey, Lewellen and Liskovich (2018) and Kamiya et …

Insider Trading and Disclosure: The Case of Cyberattacks

By Eli Amir, Shai Levi and Tsafrir Livne April 25, 2019 by renholding

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently identified incidents in which top executives sold shares before disclosing to the public negative information about cyberattacks. For example, the former chief information officer of Equifax, Jun Ying, exercised his stock options …

Prof. Coffee Testifies on Insider Trading Legislation Before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Investor Protection

By John C. Coffee, Jr. April 3, 2019 by renholding

I am very happy and honored to be back before this committee. I have been asked to comment on several proposed bills, all of which I basically support, but I will focus my limited time today primarily on Congressman Himes’ …

Insider Trading and Executive Overreach

By Kevin R. Douglas March 22, 2019 by renholding

The recent controversy over President Donald Trump’s use of his emergency authority to fund a wall on the U.S. southern border has awakened many Americans to the problem of executive overreach. Yet, what few may appreciate is that executive overreach …

Prosecuting Securities Fraud Under Section 17(a)(2)

By Wendy Gerwick Couture March 20, 2019 by renholding

Traditionally, securities fraud has been civilly enforced under Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act and Rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder, and criminally prosecuted under Section 32 of the Exchange Act. Recently, however, the SEC has increasingly asserted claims under Section 17(a)(2) …

Arnold & Porter Discusses Insider Trading’s Personal Benefit Test After Martoma, Gupta, and Other Recent Cases

By Andrew Bauer, Jonathan Green and Daniel Hawke February 19, 2019 by renholding

On January 24, former SAC Capital Advisors portfolio manager Mathew Martoma petitioned the Supreme Court to review his 2014 conviction for insider trading.  Martoma’s conviction stems from activity in 2008 when he paid a doctor from the University of Michigan …

Blue Sky Banter Podcast: John Coffee on the State of Insider Trading Law

By Reynolds Holding November 8, 2018 by renholding

Professor John C. Coffee, Jr. of Columbia Law School speaks with John Metaxas (Columbia Law ’84) about insider trading law and his role on a new task force created to develop proposals for reform in this area. The task force …

Insider Trading: Are Insolvent Firms Different?

By Andrew Verstein November 5, 2018 by renholding

Are insolvent firms different from solvent firms with respect to insider trading law and policy? Formally, the law does not change. But economic realities and non-securities law duties do. As a result, the insider trading landscape changes considerably. The law …

How Institutional Ownership Affects Insider Trading

By Stephen A. Hillegeist and Liwei Weng October 18, 2018 by renholding

Institutional owners have traditionally been thought of as passive investors that have little concern for or influence on corporate policies and decisions. In contrast, recent literature shows that while many institutions are passive in terms of their investment choices and …

Insider Trading and the Myth of Market Confidence

By John P. Anderson October 10, 2018 by renholding

Promoting public confidence in securities markets is a policy goal that is frequently cited by commentators, Congress, the courts, regulators, and prosecutors for the adoption and vigorous enforcement of insider trading laws.

For example, in the seminal insider trading case …

Insider Trading Ahead of Cyber Breach Announcements

By Zhaoxin Lin, Travis R.A. Sapp, Jackie Rees Ulmer and Rahul Parsa September 4, 2018 by renholding

On March 14, 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged a former chief information officer of Equifax with insider trading. The complaint alleged that he profited from selling stock ahead of the September 2017 public announcement of a major cybersecurity …

What Happened to “Meaningfully Close Personal Relationship” in Insider Trading?

By Peter Henning August 22, 2018 by renholding

Did insider trading law almost devolve into an effort to define  what kind of relationship a tipper and tippee must have for  a defendant to be liable? And was any federal judge or jury qualified to say? Since the Second …

Tippees and Tippers:­­ The Impact of Martoma II

By John C. Coffee, Jr. July 23, 2018 by renholding

This is a column for insider trading junkies—a special breed who love all the nuances in this very nuanced subject. Late last month, a Second Circuit panel did something fairly unusual: It withdrew a 2017 decision and substituted a new …

SEC’s Jackson Calls for Curbing Executives’ Ability to Cash Out on Buybacks

By Robert J. Jackson, Jr. June 12, 2018 by renholding

Thank you so much, Neera [Tanden], for that very kind introduction. I’ve long admired all that you and everyone here at the Center for American Progress do to promote a progressive economic agenda. And I share your commitment to making

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Post-Earnings Announcement Drift and Corporate Insider Trading

By Christina Dargenidou, Ian Tonks and Fanis Tsoligkas June 5, 2018 by renholding

Post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD) is a well-documented and puzzlingly persistent market anomaly. Companies that report earnings higher than expected typically experience an upward drift in their stock prices while those that report earnings below what was anticipated see a downward …