Judge in Nokia and Apple lawsuit owned Apple stock during proceedings | Hacker News Reader

Judge in Nokia and Apple lawsuit owned Apple stock during proceedings

appleinsider.com

227 pointsdecrypt63 comments

This article doesn’t answer the real questions: How much stock did he own, how did he own it, and what percentage of his portfolio was it?

Apple is one of the biggest companies in the US, so it comprises a significant portion of large-cap index funds. If any of your 401K or other portfolio includes an ETF or other fund with large-cap US companies, you own Apple stock.

If you’re invested 100% in a simple S&P 500 index fund, your portfolio is over 6% AAPL.

If the judge is simply reporting that he held large-cap index funds during this time, I think this is a non-story. Even a 10% drop in a company that makes up 6% of your portfolio is going to be negligible in your overall finances.

On the other hand, if he had something strange like options on AAPL around the time of his verdict, that would be a huge concern. However, I think these stories would have led with those details if they existed.

This is probably nothing.

Doesn’t look like this is just an index fund situation.

>ownership in a mutual or common investment fund that holds securities is not a “financial interest” in such securities unless the judge participates in the management of the fund

https://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/code-conduct-unit...

They could have someone managing their portfolio that basically does the same strategy as a mutual fund but technically isn't one. Unless they paid attention they wouldn't know what was being invested in at any given point in time.

This happens a lot and probably much more than people realize.

That is very possible, and I’d say the most likely answer here. It still doesn’t look great, but it’s not the kind of thing you’d expect to compromise the judge’s impartiality.

I really don’t think how much ownership is the real question now.

1. The judge disclosed it. Presumably he wasn’t doing anything sneaky because he is the one raising the issue.

2. Any ownership required the Judge to recluse himself. Thus (3)

3. (The real takeaway) The verdict of the case between Nokia and Apple is on much less strong legal grounds now. This is the real point.

> Any ownership required the Judge to recluse himself.

Where does this requirement come from? Citation please.

> It is unclear how many shares Judge Conley possessed during the case, but ownership of company stock in any capacity would have required his recusal under the Code of Conduct for United States Judges.

The apple insider article.

Only if ownership of the stock was substantially affected by the outcome of the case. Which gets back to OP's point of needing to know more specifics of the judge's holdings.

>but ownership of company stock in any capacity would have required his recusal under the Code of Conduct for United States Judges.

So, most judges? I assume they tend to be high net worth individuals, so it's very likely they own APPL in some capacity in their stock portfolios and/or retirement funds.

The Code of Conduct for United States Judges[1] Canon 3(C)(1):

> (C) Disqualification.

> (1) A judge shall disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, including but not limited to instances in which:

> …

> (c) the judge knows that the judge, individually or as a fiduciary, or the judge’s spouse or minor child residing in the judge’s household, has a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy or in a party to the proceeding, or any other interest that could be affected substantially by the outcome of the proceeding;

The interesting (IMO) tidbit here is the “knowledge” aspect of the canon. Presumably the Judge was unaware of their investment (rather than unaware of their ethical obligations) and, by my reading at least, where they had no knowledge of their financial interest they had no obligation to recuse. Although I do think it’s reasonable to expect Judges to conduct a conflicts check prior to hearing a case that would involve making themselves aware of any interest they might have in the public companies appearing before them.

[1] https://www.uscourts.gov/judges-judgeships/code-conduct-unit...

> 2. Any ownership required the Judge to recluse himself. Thus (3)

Probably a typo but recuse != recluse

"His ownership of stock neither affected nor impacted his decisions in this case."

Like any human can ascertain this about themselves.

I mean, it is possible and even likely for a person to own stock in a company without knowing it. Indexes are a very common way of investing nowadays, and many people don't go below that layer of abstraction to see in which companies the money ends up.

Not to say that good intent should be assumed in legal matters, but I can see it happening.

This is not talking about index funds. You would not call out a specific stock inside an index fund in a disclosure like this. You could figure it out, bit it's just simply not considered a conflict of interest.

If he wasn't aware he owned it at the time seems a pretty reasonable supposition.

Of course, perhaps he was aware and considered ways to hide that.

I'm not saying this is the case - I am saying you need rules that work for that specific case.

I just checked. I own Apple stock through my RRSP mutual fund. Looks like 0.5% of my investment is Apple.

Can I ascertain, about myself, that this wouldn’t affect my decision making?

Even more, if 0.5% of your investment is enough to affect your decision making, you're going to be so paralyzed by analysis paralysis and competing goals you'd never be able to get anything done.

This assumes humans consciously and continuously make decisions by a thorough and comprehensive review of their own interests.

In practice this can provide a subtle influence without having to undergo that depth of analysis.

> you're going to be so paralyzed by analysis paralysis and competing goals you'd never be able to get anything done

actually this feels like it describes me

No you can’t. Self-preservation and greed can easily be working in your subconscious. Humans are easily this fallible.

At 0.5%?

This seems laughably academic but not likely founded in reality.

Given that Nokia won the case, this is a reasonable assumption

Probably a good idea to pass a law that certain key government employees can only own index funds (here's looking at you, congress).

However, with the benefit of hindsight, we can all take solace in the fact that, regardless of the outcome of this lawsuit, Nokia was doomed to failure anyways.

Turns out a bureaucracy built around selling hardware might be liable to underestimate the rising importance of software.

Or just force judges to disclose conflicts of interests.

Isn't that exactly what this is?

Each state bar’s ethics rules already prohibit it. It’s grounds for losing your law license.

A law license isn't required to be a federal judge.

Nokia were doing well developing their new platform Meego based on Linux, but then Stephen Elop came from Microsoft and decided to put a stop to it and instead concentrate on Windows Phone. I believe that is what ultimately killed Nokia's phone division.

it was widely alleged / believed that S.E was sent to Nokia with a specific goal that would benefit M$

While the “one outsider came in and ruined everything” narrative might be a soothing one (especially for the people of Finland), I’m not sure it’s actually true.

Do we honestly think Nokia would have been able to compete in the same mobile OS space that not even Microsoft could carve out a space in?

I don’t think it’s a mistake that the only true competitor to Apple ended up being Google. At the time, they were the most competent big player in web-based software. The acquisition of Android and integration with Google services like search, navigation, gmail, etc. is a value-add that Nokia could never have matched.

Apple of course already had the value add of their entire ecosystem of computing and multimedia ecosystem (iPod, iTunes, etc).

Windows phone failed because its value-add didn’t actually have much value, unlike the Google and Apple ecosystems. It turns out nobody needs excel, PowerPoint, etc integration on their phone.

Nokia would have had even less value-add in the software space, given they had no software ecosystem at all!

> Do we honestly think Nokia would have been able to compete in the same mobile OS space that not even Microsoft could carve out a space in?

At the time.. sure.

Symbian was great back then, and in many many countries, there were no large data plans back then, and a phone that needed to be online for a lot of the gimmicky features to work was not something a lot of people wanted or needed, because of data costs... app support was probably most important to people then.

Symbian was great back then against feature phones ... but absolutely obliterated by todays competition. I have a hard time believe they would have stood a chance (even assuming the software was evens, organisationally they wouldn't have made it work).

Well, good thing they didn't have to compete with today's mobile OS's back then. Android back then was abjectly terrible. They definitely had a shot at the second spot behind Apple, especially in low-income countries.

Agreed, Android was terrible back then, but you could see the trajectory and it was housed and organised under one roof (back when Google were doing some things right), as opposed to Symbian who just seemed too fragmented to get lift off.

Lol at getting downvoted for this. I was there at the time in the middle of it. Any other view is the view of someone deluded by the fragmented promise of Symbian. It was a system that was managed into a situation of grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory. Thrown on the floor. And the stamped out of existence. Everyone involved at the leadership level should be ashamed ... ruined Symbian and dragged Nokia down with it.

I am from Brazil, and Nokia was smashing it, they had a growing market share, the more smartphones got popular, the more Symbian got popular, not iPhone, not Android.

Fans even somehow ported Valve's Counter-Strike to Symbian, along with a bunch of other games, it was really great.

Then when Elop memo came out, stores took Nokia phones out of the shelf, all of them, 2 months later their market share dropped from 68% to something like 30%'s or so, and next year instead the dominant market share was chinese shitty phones, like hiOS, android with google services removed, and so on. hiOS in particular was hilarious, a lot of people bought it thinking it was iOS from Apple (and to my surprise with a quick googling, hiOS is still a thing).

EDIT: just saw hiOS now is Android based, dunno where is information about old version, there was tons of hios phones here around 2011, thus preadating the 1.0 of current hios, that is from 2016.

If Windows Phone couldn't compete with Apple, I don't think Meego would have done any better.

From my very limited interactions with them, Nokias saw mobile operators as their customers, not end-users. They were never going to do anything with it that would piss off the likes of the like of Verizon, Vodafone, Orange etc.

I have an n800 and n810 - the n810 is a thing of beauty in my opinion, even now. But there's no way they could compete with Apple or Google because Nokia designed phones that kept the operators happy and didn't step on any toes. Apple and Google didn't care about any of that.

This is already a law for executive branch employees (SEC employees, spouses, children are generally not allowed to own individual stocks).

Correction: I got the time line wrong. Comment below is right.

>Judge William M. Conley of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin disclosed the potential conflict of interest in a letter to both parties dated Aug. 27.

It’s hard to “Assume goof faith”[0], because it looks like you avoided adding the next 3 words to your sentence because it makes it seem like the judge disclosed it before the trial and not four days ago. I feel like this context is vitally important because Nokia might simply need more time to react to this news. We don’t know what they think about this yet.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I made a mistake reading it. You're right, thanks for catching that!

Probably in like a 401k or something?

Owning Apple stock in a 401k wouldn’t reduce the appearance of impropriety.

Having exposure to Apple because it’s a component of a broad market ETF that one owns, on the other hand, would.

> "Judge Conley informed me that it has been brought to his attention that while he presided over the case he owned stock in Apple," writes Joel Turner, the court's chief deputy clerk.

That definitely makes it sound like it was a component of something else.

Much more likely to me is that he had a financial advisor handling his money. The article specifically talks about the number of shares purchased, and for most vehicles like this that makes no sense. Also, what I have read about for these conflicts of interest is that broad based index funds and such don't require disclosure. Something like an ETF that was specifically heavy in Apple might, but something that is just tech stocks probably would not.

> If tech companies fail to comply with the new law, they could face fines of up to 3 percent of their South Korea revenue.

Is this appstore revenue or total revenue? If they charge a 30% commission, is a 3% fine incentive to stop?

I think you meant to post in this thread instead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28366063

I once accidentally posted a comment in the wrong thread, and someone replied with a link to the thread I meant to post it in.

I spent the rest of the day wondering how the hell I'd managed to write an entire reply to the wrong thread.

Bet they're going through a "what... but how...?" feeling right about now.

(I still don't really know. It must be a combination of having HN tabs open, interleaved with articles, but then closing one of the comment tabs while reading its corresponding article, at which point you think of something you wanted to say about it. Presto, wrong HN thread?)

It's interesting to me that it happens on HN, but not any other site. Never seen it on Reddit, doubtful it ever happened on Slashdot, etc. There's something interesting going on with HN's simple design – simple enough that you don't realize you're in the wrong thread – plus some kind of common reading pattern that involves closing or mixing tabs.

Occasionally wondered about that over the years...

happens on reddit all of the time.. and slashdot

Yep - im going through that feeling right now :D

Thanks! no idea how that happened!

How did he only find out about it 10 years after? And how do you find out about something like that so long after?

It's not uncommon for people, especially high net-worth individuals, to not manage their own stock portfolios. Even without a professional manager, it might be the case that the spouse is dealing with the investment accounts (I know that my wife could not say what stocks we own because I've handled that and she's been happy to pass it on to me).

Read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28368078

What a malformed title!!!

Who doesn't own, nowadays?

Most people

Most people probably have some sort of pension/retirement plan/stock portfolio that contains APPL.

This is like saying a judge wore Calvin Klein underwear while presiding over a case against Calvin Klein.

Actually that sounds more like the case if the judge was a long time apple product user. I don’t stand to financially benefit in any way if fruit of the loom stock goes through the roof today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com