I'm Being Prosecuted for the Opposite of Insider Trading
wsj.com
wsj.com
> The government’s position is that I should have known I couldn’t trade stocks I’d publicly praised—for some unspecified period of time. I didn’t lie, I simply traded too soon.
The criminal complaint is here, allegations begin on page 7: https://prod-i.a.dj.com/public/resources/documents/andrew-le...
The part Left seems to be responding to in his article is:
> defendant LEFT often built his positions using inexpensive, short-dated options contracts that would expire within zero to five trading days and submitted limit orders to close his positions as soon as the Targeted Security reached a certain price.
The generic term for the government's allegations is not "the opposite of insider trading", it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump
Edit: I have now read some of the complaint. This is just sec fraud, which is consistent with what the article is claiming. "The opposite of insider trading" ie trading in the direction of the advice you're giving.
Gov says the statements were material, false, with intent. If they can't prove false to the level of being a material statement they will lose.
Edit2: This comes right up to the line, whether it's material to have false/non-statements about your intentions. There's another case that will come up if you research this about whether intentions are material.
Also, don't short sellers literally do what is described in the article?
> To maximize the impact of Citron’s commentary on the price of a Targeted Security, defendant LEFT bolstered Citron’s credibility through false and misleading statements about its research staff, process, independence, external investors, and economic incentives.
All the indexes publish what the index is comprised of, I bet if you told ${AI} all your positions it would go figure out what your net $TSLA position is.
I think $TSLA valuation is insane, but I've seen what happens to people who short it...
For one, it has large borrowing costs. You already admit that short sellers haven’t fared well, and shorting over a long time period can be very costly. Concocting a short position to offset one’s long-term index holdings requires being fairly accurate with timing and is very different than just wishing it wasn’t in there because you imagine that eventually the bill on that will come due, even if it’s years down the line.
If I’m wrong, I’d love to see a cheap way to do it over a 5-10 year period.
> Add to this fatuous criminal charge the sad reality that the process is often the punishment. Even after Mr. Left's innocence gets determined by a jury, there's the strong possibility that he'll depart the courtroom to go home to the Poor House.
> See: Wall Street Journal 8 November 2015
> I Was an Oil Spill Scapegoat -- I helped cap the Deepwater Horizon well, The Justice Department then turned my life into a legal nightmare
> -- Kurt Mix, BP drilling engineer, who published a blistering commentary about the US Justice Department immediately following a major revision to the case. After two years of expensive, life-upending dealings, all of the felony charges got dropped, and, "I would plead guilty to a minor misdemeanor for deleting a set of text messages without BP’s permission—something I had acknowledged doing from the very beginning."
> Good luck Mr. Left...
I thought this was interesting on went down the BP prosecution rabbit hole.