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Comment by mslate | Hacker News Reader

This means that employees would only be able to sell their stock 2 windows a year where they currently can sell 4 windows a year, correct?

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There is no law regarding how and when (non-exec) employees can sell company stock. The SEC only restricts insider trading, and some companies voluntarily enforce blackout periods to reduce the chance of insider trading. Plenty of public companies (e.g. Microsoft) let employees trade whenever they want.

I think the effect is actually backwards: there may only be 2 windows instead of 4 but the total amount of time window per year should theoretically go up significantly. The 2 removed reports should make both of those quarters less subject to insider trading and therefore more tradeable.

In companies I've been in, insider trading windows close because there's been a certain amount of time since the last report. So less frequent reports = more time for insider to know things that aren't public yet = more time unable to trade, not less.

That depends on your company, not the SEC. I work for a publicly traded company and have very few blackouts, mostly around earnings, for selling.

in the UK this is kinda the policy.

however the bigger issue here - is this is a ruse - there is a reason quarterly reporting brought transparency to companies - now they can easily hide nasty things.

you as an employee with stock options - yeah those are close to worthless since the price hit you can take can vary a lot.

> now they can easily hide nasty things.

For 6 months instead of 3. One could argue the need to show quarterly growth forces companies to do nastier things. Long term thinking is definitely needed these days when all companies are only focusing on short term gains.

Before 1970, the reporting was twice a year and in the first half of the twentieth century it was once a year.

Much larger windows though no? Blackout periods are prior to reporting dates.

Rather, trading periods are for a limited time after reports are released. Before employees accrue too much non public information.

That's not how it works at my company. Trading is only blocked around 3 weeks each quarter.

10b5-1 plans would presumably still be a thing if you wanted to sell more often.

Would that necessarily be a bad thing? I remember how that would drive short-termism on the part of regular employees. Since stock comp was a major part of many companies' salaries, people would hope for a bump in the earnings report. We complain about short-termism in the markets, but you can't say one thing and then do something else.

It would be bad in that it makes employees' stock less liquid. Stock-based compensation is a huge part of many employees' comp packages.

I think a small subset of people might adopt a short-term approach to equity ownership. I think a much larger subset would simply be selling to access the money they rightfully earned or to diversify their holdings instead of having the bulk of their stock portfolio in a single company.

What if someone froze half of your paycheck and said you can't touch it except for the two months out of the year that they say you can?

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