Meta shares jump on name-change news, but it's a Canadian materials company
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
Relatedly, I wonder if executives of the Canadian company considered the possibility when rumors of the FB name change started circulating. Would it be legal for executives (or other employees with a decent amount of shares) to sell their company stock now, to lock in these gains? Or would the executives be subject to a purchase/sale schedule that would make it difficult to make nimble moves like this? Employees would presumably be less constrained with regard to the timing of stock sales.
Either people are still mistaking it, or this has given the company a bit of exposure and hastened an upward trend. If you look at the 5 day chart, the current price doesn't look all that out of place.
It wasn't so much that it was bad. Bad can maybe be understood as "product in development". It was non-functional. Nothing on it ever worked in the smallest part.
At dinner tonight my partner came up with another Meta company name as well.
I guess now they've got the entire crap-in crap-out pipeline covered.
i.e. FB employee knows it is coming, places a large bet on canadian co.
Is that insider trading? It's insider knowledge sure but wrong company and a bet on the behaviour of other market participants
> The laws pertaining to insider trading encompass (a) trading by an insider while in possession of material non-public information; (b) trading by a non-insider while in possession of material non-public information, where the information either was disclosed to the non-insider in violation of an insider’s duty to keep it confidential or was misappropriated; and (c) communicating material non-public information to others.
The concept of an “insider” is broad and includes officers, directors and employees of an issuer. In addition, a person can be a “temporary insider” if he or she enters into a special confidential relationship with the issuer and, as a result, is given access to confidential information. A temporary insider can include an issuer’s attorneys, accountants or consultants.
My reading of this (as a former lawyer) is that under current law, insider trading requires that there be an insider involved. The insider can be the person who did the trading, or a person who transmitted information to other people. The insider has to be someone affiliated with the issuer (of stock that is being bought/sold).
OTOH, there's probably not much benefit to buying stock in advance of the actual announcement. If the expectation is that the pop happens after the announcement, someone could just wait until the second it's announced and then make a purchase. Presumably the share price wouldn't have gone up appreciably in the intervening seconds (but HFT, I know), so it would yield roughly the same result, and without the possibility of insider trading charges!
Follow-up question: is it a violation of insider trading laws to prepare a transaction and then execute it the instant that material information is made public? Does an insider (or someone informed by an insider) need to wait a reasonable period, in order to give the rest of the market time to digest the information that has just been revealed?
Especially in these days of meme stock, think about it, the reason to buy $META is meta ... (mind blown)
'(They) assumed retail investors would be making most of the mistakes. But Nikorov told CNN Business that the rise of algorithmic trading is probably the reason big mutual funds and hedge funds get fooled.
“Computers scan for stocks and look for ones in play. So if there is [an] unexplained move, the algorithms don’t look for a reason. They just jump on the bandwagon,” Nikorov said.'
https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/12/investing/ticker-symbol-confu...
Is it growing? Meh.
Is it profitable? Meh.
Does it have a competitive moat? Meh.
Is it robust against inflation? Bo-oh-ring.
Is it newsworthy? Is it trending? Will others buy it? Buy! Buy! Buy!
...and then, of course, there are those who are taking advantage of this idiocy every day while it lasts.