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Comment by calt | Hacker News Reader

What's the connection?

Here is some more context - http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/169166980422/the-myst...

The connection between the linked article in this comment and the linked page for this post is that there is a potentially huge bug that will be made public soon and it just affects Intel processors, not AMD - hence the large sale of stock by the Intel CEO.

If your allegation is true, that would seem to be very illegal.

I've heard you can schedule big sales all the time and then regularly cancel them unless something goes wrong. Apparently there is no rule against insider canceling.

Speculative execution bug causes speculative stock sale non-cancellation?

That's correct as I understand it, though there is a risk that some high-profile event will cause the media to whip up enough (understandable) public outrage to cause the SEC to actually, reluctantly fine someone for that.

That's not true. Changing a stock sale plan in any way is considered insider trading. The window has nothing to do with whether it's legal or not. It's only used a risk mitigation and is up to company policy.

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2013/02/05/rule-10b5-1-plans...

I think the point the cma was making is that this trick doesn't involve making changes to (formal) stock-sale plans. The formal plan is to sell regularly, and that remains unchanged, you just cancel it by hand habitually, except when you don't.

I am no lawyer, so I don't know if this is really allowed. My gut instinct is (a) no, it is not allowed and (b) there will always be some more subtle version of the tactic that is allowed.

Just hire a DDoS attack anonymously so your attempt to sell fails, pretend you've got nothing to do with it

It is a lot less clear cut than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b5-1#A_possible_loo...

Michael Milkin, the junk bond king of the 80s, realized that corporate bonds traded similarly to stocks, yet were not covered by insider trading laws.

Not sure if it makes any sense and even logical to compare the market before and after Intel's floating point bug was uncovered a decade ago. My bet is this current bug won't shake Intel's stock price much.

If the workaround being deployed now causes a 30% performance hit in real world usage, even just for some cases, it could hit Intel way harder than fdiv.

A lot of people on Intel will suddenly lose a noticeable amount of performance. Conversely, if your Intel based VMs lose 25% performance, you are now booting up and paying for 20% more VMs for the same load.

Full Story https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_fl...

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