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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Here's a fun ethical question: The OP mentions in the article and here in the comments that most likely his 1 day performance is better than the market because people buy the stocks he recommends, pushing the price up. One person here called it "casual market manipulation".

Assuming that's true, would it be unethical/illegal if you knew what he was going to recommend and then buying that ahead of his announcement?

Further, would it be unethical/illegal for Cramer himself to buy all the stocks ahead of his own recommendations?

And further still, would it be unethical/illegal for Cramer to sell a service where you could give him money and he'd make the trades for you ahead of his own recommendations?

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Research departments of major banks regularly issue public upgrades or downgrades of public company stocks. These move stock prices. The banks sell these research reports early to their investors and 20 minutes earlier or so to their most invested investors. And those can play on the recommendation against all the other suckers. This is legal.

How is that not the literal definition of insider information and trading on non-public information? I suppose they will claim that they make their predictions based on publicly attainable information and therefore anyone else could have made the same pick even before the announce it. But in that case aren't they admitting that releasing the information manipulates the market?

It's fine to trade when you know something that the general public doesn't. Indeed that's really the only time you should trade: you presumably want to make a profit, and society wants relevant information to be incorporated into prices. The thing that's not fine is trading on secret information that belongs to someone else. Insider trading is about theft, not fairness. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-04-01/anothe...

It should be illegal, in theory? Insider trading doesn't require a company insider, only that you have non-public information that can reasonably affect the price iirc. Proving that may be difficult in practice.

IANAL yadda yadda.

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