Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

How come SEC only discloses this now? Isn't preventing insider trading a goal of financial regulations? If so, is there a reason SEC didn't disclose it as soon as they gained knowledge of the leak?

I think this goes to show that any data collection is dangerous, even if government thinks they're the good guys (when in fact they're naively collecting data that could be weaponized against them very easily). The EU is on to it as well with MiFID II granular reporting of financial market transactions starting effectively next year.

Though I'm not sure the Brits are going to play along (where the majority of trading happens in Europe); after all, why should they go through the trouble of implementing MiFID/MiFIR when leaving EU anyway?

Edit: preventing insider trading

Well, just because this was disclosed to the public now doesn't mean it wasn't previously disclosed to Treasury, FINRA, the US Equity SROs, and the ESMA. The surveillance systems surrounding almost any market center are substantial, and can seek the sort of behavior having inside information might appear as.

That makes sense, but do we have info on whether that actually happened? Who's overseeing the overseers? The only theory under which it would make sense to withhold that info I can think of are criminal investigation tactics, but there's no actual info on suspect transactions, is there?

Broadly and vaguely trusting in surveillance isn't convincing at all. The usefulness of surveillance must be weighed and re-evaluated against risks, as demonstrated by this incident.

I guess by surveillance I was speaking purely transactional surveillance, and typically investigations into transactional behavior takes time, and under certain circumstances would result in criminal prosecution (on top of any regulatory fines/punishment).

It also takes time to coordinate investigating multiple different asset class transactions, in the event, say, equity derivatives are used.

And no, we don’t have info on what happened and what was taken, and certainly nothing about any regulatory investigations.

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