Jerome Powell Sold More Than a Million Dollars of Stock as Market Was Tanking | Hacker News Reader

Jerome Powell Sold More Than a Million Dollars of Stock as Market Was Tanking

prospect.org

17 pointspaulpauper9 comments

> Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of stock from his personal account on October 1, 2020

So he missed out on a ton of gainz. Why are they upset he missed out on between $500,000 and $5mil ?

Thank you. Not sure why people are spreading this dumb “scandal”

S&P taken on a sensible interval around the time. Brutal tanking of the markets.

Jun 1, 2020 3,104.66

Jul 1, 2020 3,207.62

Aug 1, 2020 3,391.71

Sep 1, 2020 3,365.52

Oct 1, 2020 3,418.70

Nov 1, 2020 3,548.99

Dec 1, 2020 3,695.31

Jan 1, 2021 3,793.75

Oct 1, 2021 4,359.28

Let’s be clear:

1. He sold index funds, not individual stocks like the other officials.

2. His “boss” (Trump) was holding up legislation to save the economy so it’s possible he was worried about the economy for reasons outside his control

3. The stock market went up drastically since then, so he would have much more money if he had just held his Vanguard funds since then. SPY went from what $330 to $450? So he missed a gain of 33%.

This is a really dumb “scandal” that makes no sense. Leave the dude alone. Go after the Senators like Richard Burr and probably Kelly Loeffler who really were insider trading

Or bigger fish like Nancy Pelosi who discretely trades through her husband.

sounds like a great job perk, though if he directly caused the market to tank then that would be kinda shady

He sold at the market bottom.

If this was an insider trade, it was the worst one I've ever seen

Cheating the market usually doesn't work. Selling before a downturn looks good on paper, but timing the market is extremely difficult and you usually still lose, even with insider information. If you include the risk of getting caught, it's an absolutely insane proposition. I'd guess that selling as an insider trader almost never works out financially.

That may influence the sentence or fines the judge chooses to levy, but it doesn't change whether or not it was a crime. And I don't think it changes the moral dimension, either.

Actually cheating the market usual does work, selling with actual inside information is straight forward and almost always works out financially.

Doing so involves actual private information that is about to become public, on a narrow and specific company and the timeframe for exploiting this informaiton is pretty short term. Exploiting inside information on say an economic data release would be on a timeframe of seconds to minutes.

Doing so on the broad market or trading a general market turndown or 'timing the market' - there is no inside information for this. You would have to have inside information on data releases from 5-10 countries, announcements of all the governements of these countries, announcements of all the central banks of these countries for the next 30-60 days.

It would also be handy to have info on the 500 biggest companies in the world, plus the future consumption habbits of say 500million people. Knowledge of any terrorism, viral outbreak, ship, plane, train, bus, car or manufacturing plant failure or shortfall over the 30 day period as well as any combinations of wind and tide that might cause an incident like a ship running aground in the suez.

But if you do happen to have all this, then you can insider trade pretty easily.

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