Someone who buys a few million in puts just before hacking twitter is indistinguishable from some random robinhood user who decides it's time to go all in on puts because of a wsb post.
Lots of people have had the idea that the SEC/FBI/etc. can never catch them. Right up until they go to prison.
Any stats/evidence to backup your claim?
Of course, insider trading among well connected hedge fund managers and our unaccountable financial elite is indeed pervasive and goes by without being prosecuted all the time, but it's fair to assume yesterday's hackers aren't in this protected class.
And a lot of those non-prosecutions involve either (a) civil fines, (b) the compliance department censuring or firing the relevant employee, or (c) the Feds backing down from a fight with a big white shoe defense firm. None of that applies to these Twitter hackers.
Because anyone could just buy a crap load of $0.10 options marked a week out, wait a few days, then tank the stock. It would look like you got stupidly lucky, I have no clue how anyone could connect that to the twitter event directly. Especially since it’s not like you’ll be the only one that “won the lottery”.
(Tesla isn’t a great stock for doing this though because their IV is so high that the premiums are crazy expensive)
Precisely why you would be caught.
So you would investigate this poster for insider trading? There are thousands of posts like this each week.
For these people buying $10,000 out of the money contracts on a random ticker is completely normal and still legal. So tipping somebody like that off would certainly hard to correlate.
The more standard deviations you go into profitability, especially over one trade, the more likely you'll be to get the stink-eye.
From that point, if someone raises a flag, it's just a matter of seeing whether they've been implicated in anything else. It's why departments that seemingly have no reason to have intel access are hooked into classified networks - precisely for this kind of data sharing.
Is your position outsized relative to other punters in the OTM weeklies market? Most people don't bet the farm on one big lottery trade because the risk of ruin is too great.
Will there really be that many people who time things as well as you do and haul in a bonanza payout as though they had perfect foresight? A lot won't even be watching the market for the 5 or 10 minutes your rumor moves the stock, and of those who are, a lot of them will hang on for moar gainz.
Basically you can use not that much money to buy unlikely to be profitable options and make an actual crapload of money - and it would look identical to just being lucky.
The thing is 90% of people don't trade options themselves, and 99% of people don't do random fd plays. If you tipped off someone from WSB then they'd likely get away with it - that's what they do. Tip off a family member who has never traded options before, well....