Honestly, who thinks they can get away with moronically obvious insider trading like this? "Oh, I know, I'll take large positions right before this reporter publishes MNPI, and I'll do it five times". Obviously you are going to get caught!
Yeah - this is one stupid example, but if people are saying this kind of thing in a relatively public place as instruction it's probably happening everywhere all the time. You can usually see it in stock trends before some event happens.
Financial crime isn't prosecuted very aggressively, basically unless it is a slam dunk easy case, evidence is ignored.
Four year old blog post, but gives a sense of scale:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/analytics-without-...
Stick to TSLA ;)
/s
brokers and all licensed financial firms are essentially deputized to freeze and enforce this stuff on behalf of the regulator, who then has time to get a emergency asset freeze rubber stamped by an "administrator law judge" who basically works on staff at the regulatory agency
then you can prove why you aren't guilty by retaining a good lawyer with all that other money you have which isn't frozen, you have that right?
the better way is to use a bot to execute the trades right after publication, or do it manually and lose a little bit of alpha. but he didn't.
That's going to show up in a simple search, and there's not a lot of alternative explanations for it.
It's not obvious to me how you'd separate this from intentional trading on insider information. (Unless you just investigate everyone).
My guess is it will stick out like a sore thumb if you buy x shares right before an announcement and sell x right after. Especially if you do nothing else. Pretty much as soon as you've exited a second announcement-trade red lights should be flashing.
As long as they're just investigating and not necessarily prosecuting every event that probably sounds fine (I'd be curious to know what the prosecution "funnel" looks like for flagged individuals in real life -- 100%? 1%?), but it's important not to let an intuitive sense for things that are definitely too unlikely to happen by chance to cloud our judgement and create something like another Sally Clark event[0].