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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Seems debatable. From what I recall, at least some news about this issue was already public before he sold his shares. And what would be illegal would be trading based on information that isn't public. OTOH, since details are still dribbling out, you could possibly argue that the Intel CEO had more complete information than the public.

The sell could also have been scheduled in advance, which would - AFAIK - not violate any insider trading regulations.

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Unless the advance scheduling is completely binding, I don't see why that should sidestep insider trading. What's to stop these guys from always having a cascading series of sells and buys 6 mo. in advance, and just cancelling them?

What is to "stop these guys" is the legal parties and officials involved have brains that they can use. The engineer idea of "mwa ha ha, I found a bug, I can walk" is rarely true in practice (n.b.: having quite a lot of money is a different kind of exception).

Basically this: https://xkcd.com/1494/

SEC rules also cover cancellation of orders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b5-1#A_possible_loo...

What, they are never allowed to sell shares then? There are constantly bugs being found in major software and hardware.

Surely this is a material design defect that anyone would expect to hurt Intel's business in a very significant way.

>Unless the advance scheduling is completely binding

It gets filed with the SEC so should be suitably permanent

A good rule of thumb is that if you think you've discovered a loophole that would allow insider trading, and it only took you a few moments of thinking, the SEC thought of it already.

The orders registered with the SEC and all these cancellations would attract a lot of their attention. I have no doubt they would see through it pretty easily once they started investigating

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