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Comment by wilg | Hacker News Reader

Could you explain more? That is like a hundred pages of regulations and I don't know anything about this.

Short answer: reg fd requires companies to disclose information material to investors to all investors. The previous post is suggesting that the close work with the bank analysts is conveying material information without proper disclosure. My hunch is that the legions is compliance lawyers at both the banks and at the companies have deemed this to be within the bounds of the regulation, but we’ll see if the SEC/US Attorneys agree.

FWIW, my hunch is lots of information gets shared that the SEC doesn’t know about.

As long as breaking regulation is on average profitable the market dictates that regulation will be broken.

So depending on the risk/reward it most certainly can happen.

Being cynical, I'd assume the "help" they offer is more likely to be stock market manipulation than disclosure of material information.

That's incorrect for these style of calls. The help is more akin to marketing - the company is arguing that they are doing better than the analyst thinks, and the analyst's company is offering their help to explain that to them and to other analysts.

That's exactly what I meant. They are not necessarily disclosing real information, they are trying to increase the stock price.

That isn't what stock market manipulation[1] means.

  Market manipulation may involve techniques including:
    Spreading false or misleading information about a company;
    Engaging in a series of transactions to make a security appear more actively traded; and
    Rigging quotes, prices, or trades to make it look like there is more or less demand for a security than is the case.

Presenting real information in a way that makes it more clear to investors is absolutely not market manipulation, and no interested party would ever claim otherwise.

[1] https://www.investor.gov/additional-resources/general-resour...

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