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Comment by bmmayer1 | Hacker News Reader

Step 1: buy TSLA puts Step 2: @elonmusk: "I'm retiring effective immediately. Don't believe what you read in the news tomorrow." Step 3: Profit

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Step 4: go to jail

Tesla has such absurd volume and short interest that buying a large amount of puts on it would not be suspicious at all.

It's an ocean of contracts out there.

The ocean is not so wide or deep as to guarantee that the FBI treating it as a high-priority case wouldn't find correlation between evidence the hacker left on their Twitter attack and market motion. They have a lot of resources to invest, and are willing to spend more than the short-term value of money changing hands in the fraud.

The suspicion doesn't trigger until the twitter scam happens. Once the scam happens though then a huge amount of scrutiny is triggered on all of the TSLA market activity. Will you still be able to hide? Maybe. But the high profile nature of the Twitter scam guarantees that they will be looking for you.

What makes you think the market wouldn't react positively to such news?

Yeah, I honestly don't have a sense in which direction the stock would go with such an announcement.

I am not even sure it would move much in either direction. Some traders would think it's good, some bad. Everyone's bets would cancel each other out and the delta in either direction would be small.

My guess is it would trend downward since my evaluation of $tsla is that it is a personality driven bubble; but my evaluation isn't everyone else's.

Cuz, TSLA is MUSK. WIthout him, the company has batteries on wheels.

As the article points out, if you do this in enough size to make serious money, you're highly likely to get caught.

But until you did, you would have made more money than the Twitter hacker.

Yes, but there's a lot of room between ~$150k (that the defrauded bitcoins are worth) and what counts as "serious money" that will get you caught -- contradicting the clickbait thesis of "you couldn't have made more money" than the hacker. This is especially true in an environment of a stock that's heavily shorted already.

And if you really want to be pedantic, the hacker has made $0 from it so far, since the Bitcoins haven't been transferred anywhere to cash out. Which is pretty easy to beat :-p

The SEC frequently goes after proverbial insider trading dentists who make ill gotten gains in the $100K range. Given the intense focus there would be to catch the market manipulators, a sub-$1 million haul wouldn't be much protection.

Those types are caught because they're people who do virtually no active trading and then buy an individual stock while related (and connected by phone/email contact) to an insider. Not day traders who have joined a massive herd of the world's favorite stock to short.

Yea, but it's been shown that well placed posts on wallstreetbets can cause trading activity. A post like "some of you guys are cool. Don't hold any tesla puts on Wednesday" might be enough to generate a bunch of trades you can hide under.

I mean, maybe if you plan ahead to make it look like you had bought the PUTs anyway as a hedge. Plus then you better hope it actually drops by the amount you think it will. Definitely less guaranteed.

Maybe I'd buy call options instead? ;)

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