What if it's not insider trading and in fact the Trump inner circle has been compromised and foreign actors are trading on the news? You might think they wouldn't want to expose themselves just to make some money on oil futures, but at this point, they are bringing in billions.
Civilization will be effected the same way anyway, why not make a buck of it? But you wouldn't be able to anyway because some quant's ml model would have already sucked every dollar out of the opportunity two milliseconds after the insider executed the trade
Psychopaths and sociopaths come from all types of backgrounds. One things for sure, they all tend to gravitate towards power and exploitation of people without remorse. C suite and founders are far from immune from this...
These were before news reports that came out with the scoop before any press conference. How would you know that some big news scoop is going to drop? You'd have to jump on every futures drop.
>paying what in retrospect will have been an excessive price
This can be said about any negative price movement. You still get the same amount of oil you agreed to regardless of if the price goes up or down afterwards.
> "The Trump administration is making no real effort to crack down on whoever is trading using inside information, and these inside traders are operating with a complete sense of impunity, assured that they can get away with it."
There will always be opportunities for insider trading, and there always have been. The Rothschilds could get news across Europe quicker than the kings could, so they made vast fortunes.
Therefore, why not assume every trade is insider dealing, unless proven otherwise?
Compare to the security on the O.G. MS-DOS PC, where every file was considered perfectly fine. Yeah, we had viruses and that meant untold bloat with anti-Virus shame-wear.
The UNIX way was always better, however, let's move along to ChromeOS. Here every file was considered harmful unless proven otherwise.
The US economy is getting gamified with prediction markets, where you can bet on anything, for example, how many out of Context Capital Letters that the orange Man uses in his social Media posts at 4 a.m.
My feeling is that, amongst this expansion in 'prediction markets', some people don't like it how mere citizens can play too. It is different if you are in Congress, you have got to make your money somehow, but having mere citizens playing the game? Get outta here!
The truth is that any empire needs to pick off rivals and rob them, in order to keep the empire going. We need a world at peace, where the 'monopoly board' isn't tossed into the air all the time. Then most of these problems would go away, albeit not all of them, as in the 'acts of god' such as earthquakes.
The Rothschilds getting news faster because they build an information network is not inside trading. Inside trading is when you have a legal and fiduciary duty not to trade and not to disclose information. The people working in the US government have that obligation and are not abiding by those rules.
Look, just come out and say you’re okay with them doing what they’re doing. Stop making arguments that are just verifiably untrue.
> Amends the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to declare that such Members and employees owe a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to Congress, the U.S. government, and U.S. citizens with respect to material, nonpublic information derived from their positions as Members or congressional employees or gained from performance of the individual's official responsibilities.
(Sec. 5) Amends the Commodity Exchange Act to apply to Members and congressional employees, or to judicial officers or employees its prohibitions against certain transactions, involving the purchase or sale of any commodity in interstate commerce, or for future delivery, or any swap.
Extends the meaning of "covered government person" (currently restricted to Members of Congress and congressional employees) to include the President, Vice President, an employee of the U.S. Postal Service or the Postal Regulatory Commission, or any other executive branch employee.
>Look, just come out and say you’re okay with them doing what they’re doing
Don't put words in my mouth. Moreover I'm not sure how you can come to the conclusion that I'm "re okay with them doing what they’re doing", when I specifically acknowledged they have a duty not to leak classified intel.
>Members and employees owe a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to Congress, the U.S. government, and U.S. citizens with respect to material
I’m not entirely sure if you understand what fiduciary duty actually means if you read federal ethics laws and don’t make the connection. Just because you can’t control+f “fiduciary duty” doesn’t mean the concept isn’t identical. Hell, there’s literally a law that bans insider trading futures on unknown information. Not “kind of like it”, literally named verbatim.
And I’m not putting words in your mouth, I’m just calling out your revealed preferences.
They do not have a fiduciary duty that is enforceable in a court of law or equity. But the trusteeship model of representative government is basically how we've conceived of the duties of elected officials in liberal democratic republics since John Locke. As a normative matter, we feel that a public official who benefits their private interests at the expense of the public trust has violated their duties to the public. That just is what a fiduciary relationship looks like.
Sending a letter containing public information to a place that hasn't heard yet is not insider trading, even if you own the post office. Algorithmic trading firms are doing the modern equivalent of this at all times to arbitrage the NYC/LON/HK exchanges.
The classic example is that sitting outside a factory and counting trucks does not result in insider information, but driving the trucks does. Even though it is the same information.
> There will always be opportunities for insider trading, and there always have been. The Rothschilds could get news across Europe quicker than the kings could, so they made vast fortunes.
the question is if those links and thumbnail were back then on the front page / timeline. Because otherwise how you supposed to know about the news if you have to google it first.
So if this sort of "insider trading" is bad, what does this mean for other sorts off strategies hedge funds do to get an edge, like flying helicopters to look at how full oil storage tanks are? Should that be banned too? The article basically argues that any sort of edge is bad because it disincentivizes others from participating.
edit: see my subsequent comment. I'm not saying corruption is good. The whole point of the article is that it's bad beyond just corruption, and that's the point I'm pushing back on.
This insider trading isn't hedge-funds working hard to get an edge. It's political insiders trading ahead of public statements. They are getting gains not by dint of being incredibly smart, nor from working very hard. Instead its from abusing their position in power. And by doing so in this manner, they are taking money away from the actual productive people trading in the futures market.
Besides, as Matt Levine often says. In the US, insider trading is a matter of miss-appropriating information when you have a duty of confidentiality. Its not about trading when you know more than someone else. Its about trading when you know something your not supposed to share.
>It's political insiders trading ahead of public statements. They are getting gains not by dint of being incredibly smart, nor from working very hard. Instead its from abusing their position in power.
The article specifically argues that it's extra bad beyond just corruption. That's the part I'm pushing back on.
>The stench of corruption is overwhelming. Yet aside from the raw corruption, these incidents also raise a larger question. The insiders ripped off the parties who sold futures to them at what turned out to be very unfavorable prices to the sellers. What broader damage does this kind of unchecked insider trading do?
A market maker who doesn't know if their counterparty is a Trump insider looking to fleece them must ask for a bigger safety margin to cover the risk they are taking -- and not just from the insiders. Honest participants in the market get taxed in order to provide the insider payout.
This is extremely basic incenive / money-flow tracing and "setting aside corruption" is a premise that has the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight up. It smells like someone looking to bake the hypothetical. Everyone before me in this conversation was right to be suspicious of your motives in asking it, and I am suspicious as well.
>A market maker who doesn't know if their counterparty is a Trump insider looking to fleece them must ask for a bigger safety margin to cover the risk they are taking -- and not just from the insiders. Honest participants in the market get taxed in order to provide the insider payout.
That's still corruption. Your argument about other participants being "taxed" applies for other sophisticated counterparties as well, eg. hedge funds with armies of analysts and can fly helicopters around to gather intel. Unless you want to say that's bad too, the only difference between the two is that the hedge fund isn't engaging in corruption.
I'm not sure what world we live in where being able to rent a helicopter implies hard work and not large amounts of preexisting wealth (generally taken by many to indicate at least some abuse of power, somewhere along the way).
It's a world where renting a helicopter is hilariously cheap available to some average person.
Looking at my local tourist helicopter place, a private custom flight is $1k per ~15m. That seems like nothing if it allows you be make millions with the information.
Shorts don't cost much to open, just the borrow rate on the shares. As long as it goes straight down you can leverage quite a bit without getting called.
Of course, this is the fastest way to lose your shirt and everything you have ever worked for, if there is any uncertainty.
Gee, what could go wrong using governmental info to provide personal gain? Surely they wouldn't be tempted to start causing situations to become reality for personal gain! (ala Dick Cheney and Halliburton.)
Politician are servants of the people, for the people. This involves sacrifice and following the law. (I realize this is a naive statement, but shouldn't we be jailing these law breakers?)
> So if this sort of "insider trading" is bad, what does this mean for other sorts off strategies hedge funds do to get an edge, like flying helicopters to look at how full oil storage tanks are?
This is allowed because you've gotten that extra information through your own methods that in theory anyone else can get access to. The problem here is they're using information that nobody else could possibly have access to, therefore its "insider" trading and it's been illegal for a long time.
There are differences between the insider trading and your helicopter example. The theory is the better traders know the reality when making decisions, the better. When oil traders hide information about their reserves, they are working on creating a rift between the reality and the public knowledge. Helicopter is overcoming it. When Trump makes empty announcements that change prices in a purely speculative manner, but before doing this he buys futures, he is just creating instability on the market and he exploiting it. Instability is bad, the whole idea of futures is to deal with the risks stemming from the instability.
Instability is bad, but when the cause of it is market getting new information, it becomes ok: it is bad now, but it is good in the long term. But when the instability becomes a source of profits, when there are incentives and means to create the instability, then long term benefits go away.
This kind of "well eksuallyyyy" argument isn't very useful or good faith when a systemic harm is highlighted. It's just contrarian muddying of the conversation.
It's not, when the article is specifically arguing that the insider trading is bad beyond just corruption, and barely touches corruption. You don't get to tack on a weak claim on top of a strong claim, and then when the weak claim gets pushback fall back to the strong claim and say everything's fine because you're directionally correct, or claim the person pushing back is wrong because they're directionally incorrect.
> The real issue is never whether the trading was unfair to the people on the other side; it’s whether the information was misappropriated from its rightful owners
In this case the rightful owners are the American public in whose employ the leakers are. They got this information from their position of trust, and sold that information, to the disadvantage of the people they work for.
Considering the very House, Senate, and connected buffoons with the presidency are all in on insider trading and corruption... Why shouldnt others?
Hell, being a congresscritter in charge of oversight of $industry allows you to cheat the public cause you know what's coming. How else do you see a senator making $174k/yr but net worth's of $100M? Its legal, only cause they carved their own exemptions and scam the public.
The numbers are big enough that I kind of suspect it's the various funds that are doing it. They've probably have some legal gray area intel they're leveraging like paying a guy who knows a guy overseas who knows a guy who's a l33t h4x0r (i.e. someone who got erroneously invited to a group chat).
The worst part is the sharp changes in the price being traded aren't achieved by magic but rather with guns & actual human suffering
The war must continue in order to bring us to the status quo that was in place before we started the war.
I hope that everyone responsible for this is enjoying every cent of what they get to pay at the pumps.
What if it's not insider trading and in fact the Trump inner circle has been compromised and foreign actors are trading on the news? You might think they wouldn't want to expose themselves just to make some money on oil futures, but at this point, they are bringing in billions.
Can you watch what happens on a market just before the press conference and do the same?
Eager to make bank off the back of civilisation, too? My IT colleagues continue to impress!
Civilization will be effected the same way anyway, why not make a buck of it? But you wouldn't be able to anyway because some quant's ml model would have already sucked every dollar out of the opportunity two milliseconds after the insider executed the trade
Psychopaths and sociopaths come from all types of backgrounds. One things for sure, they all tend to gravitate towards power and exploitation of people without remorse. C suite and founders are far from immune from this...
> far from immune from this...
Its a pre-requisite for the job
These were before news reports that came out with the scoop before any press conference. How would you know that some big news scoop is going to drop? You'd have to jump on every futures drop.
>paying what in retrospect will have been an excessive price
This can be said about any negative price movement. You still get the same amount of oil you agreed to regardless of if the price goes up or down afterwards.
> "The Trump administration is making no real effort to crack down on whoever is trading using inside information, and these inside traders are operating with a complete sense of impunity, assured that they can get away with it."
I think this sums it up.
The inside trader made no real effort to crack down on themselves
Indeed, since 2016.
There will always be opportunities for insider trading, and there always have been. The Rothschilds could get news across Europe quicker than the kings could, so they made vast fortunes.
Therefore, why not assume every trade is insider dealing, unless proven otherwise?
Compare to the security on the O.G. MS-DOS PC, where every file was considered perfectly fine. Yeah, we had viruses and that meant untold bloat with anti-Virus shame-wear.
The UNIX way was always better, however, let's move along to ChromeOS. Here every file was considered harmful unless proven otherwise.
The US economy is getting gamified with prediction markets, where you can bet on anything, for example, how many out of Context Capital Letters that the orange Man uses in his social Media posts at 4 a.m.
My feeling is that, amongst this expansion in 'prediction markets', some people don't like it how mere citizens can play too. It is different if you are in Congress, you have got to make your money somehow, but having mere citizens playing the game? Get outta here!
The truth is that any empire needs to pick off rivals and rob them, in order to keep the empire going. We need a world at peace, where the 'monopoly board' isn't tossed into the air all the time. Then most of these problems would go away, albeit not all of them, as in the 'acts of god' such as earthquakes.
The Rothschilds getting news faster because they build an information network is not inside trading. Inside trading is when you have a legal and fiduciary duty not to trade and not to disclose information. The people working in the US government have that obligation and are not abiding by those rules.
Rothschilds getting news faster, high-frequency trading of the old days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading
Supplying news as fast as possibles is also the business model of Thomson Reuters.
https://www.thetradenews.com/thomson-reuters-algo-news-feed-...
>and fiduciary duty not to trade and not to disclose information. The people working in the US government have that obligation
No they don't. They might have duties not to leak classified information, but not fiduciary duty.
Look, just come out and say you’re okay with them doing what they’re doing. Stop making arguments that are just verifiably untrue.
> Amends the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to declare that such Members and employees owe a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to Congress, the U.S. government, and U.S. citizens with respect to material, nonpublic information derived from their positions as Members or congressional employees or gained from performance of the individual's official responsibilities.
(Sec. 5) Amends the Commodity Exchange Act to apply to Members and congressional employees, or to judicial officers or employees its prohibitions against certain transactions, involving the purchase or sale of any commodity in interstate commerce, or for future delivery, or any swap.
Extends the meaning of "covered government person" (currently restricted to Members of Congress and congressional employees) to include the President, Vice President, an employee of the U.S. Postal Service or the Postal Regulatory Commission, or any other executive branch employee.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/senate-bill/203...
"Members of Congress outperformed the S&P 500—sometimes by huge amounts"
https://fortune.com/2024/01/03/members-of-congress-profit-fr...
"The 2 ETFs That Track Congressional Stock Trades"
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/2-etfs-that-track-congress...
The insider trading on oil futures is just on much bigger scale.
>Look, just come out and say you’re okay with them doing what they’re doing
Don't put words in my mouth. Moreover I'm not sure how you can come to the conclusion that I'm "re okay with them doing what they’re doing", when I specifically acknowledged they have a duty not to leak classified intel.
>Members and employees owe a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to Congress, the U.S. government, and U.S. citizens with respect to material
That's not "fiduciary duty". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary#Relationships
I’m not entirely sure if you understand what fiduciary duty actually means if you read federal ethics laws and don’t make the connection. Just because you can’t control+f “fiduciary duty” doesn’t mean the concept isn’t identical. Hell, there’s literally a law that bans insider trading futures on unknown information. Not “kind of like it”, literally named verbatim.
And I’m not putting words in your mouth, I’m just calling out your revealed preferences.
They do not have a fiduciary duty that is enforceable in a court of law or equity. But the trusteeship model of representative government is basically how we've conceived of the duties of elected officials in liberal democratic republics since John Locke. As a normative matter, we feel that a public official who benefits their private interests at the expense of the public trust has violated their duties to the public. That just is what a fiduciary relationship looks like.
Sending a letter containing public information to a place that hasn't heard yet is not insider trading, even if you own the post office. Algorithmic trading firms are doing the modern equivalent of this at all times to arbitrage the NYC/LON/HK exchanges.
The classic example is that sitting outside a factory and counting trucks does not result in insider information, but driving the trucks does. Even though it is the same information.
> There will always be opportunities for insider trading, and there always have been. The Rothschilds could get news across Europe quicker than the kings could, so they made vast fortunes.
That is not an example of insider trading
funny aside: rothshields were mentioned more than trump in the epstein files, yet no outlet even touched that fact..
Of course this is a complete lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_of_Jeffrey_Epstein...
https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/the-rothschild-dynasty-s...
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/epstein-files-show-...
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/02/05/j...
the question is if those links and thumbnail were back then on the front page / timeline. Because otherwise how you supposed to know about the news if you have to google it first.
So if this sort of "insider trading" is bad, what does this mean for other sorts off strategies hedge funds do to get an edge, like flying helicopters to look at how full oil storage tanks are? Should that be banned too? The article basically argues that any sort of edge is bad because it disincentivizes others from participating.
edit: see my subsequent comment. I'm not saying corruption is good. The whole point of the article is that it's bad beyond just corruption, and that's the point I'm pushing back on.
This insider trading isn't hedge-funds working hard to get an edge. It's political insiders trading ahead of public statements. They are getting gains not by dint of being incredibly smart, nor from working very hard. Instead its from abusing their position in power. And by doing so in this manner, they are taking money away from the actual productive people trading in the futures market.
Besides, as Matt Levine often says. In the US, insider trading is a matter of miss-appropriating information when you have a duty of confidentiality. Its not about trading when you know more than someone else. Its about trading when you know something your not supposed to share.
>It's political insiders trading ahead of public statements. They are getting gains not by dint of being incredibly smart, nor from working very hard. Instead its from abusing their position in power.
The article specifically argues that it's extra bad beyond just corruption. That's the part I'm pushing back on.
>The stench of corruption is overwhelming. Yet aside from the raw corruption, these incidents also raise a larger question. The insiders ripped off the parties who sold futures to them at what turned out to be very unfavorable prices to the sellers. What broader damage does this kind of unchecked insider trading do?
> The article specifically argues that it's extra bad beyond just corruption. That's the part I'm pushing back on.
They are elected officials that are supposed to be working in our best interests, or at least the interest of their supporters.
Are they making decisions in our best interests or what makes their pocket book fatter? Poisons the whole system.
Again, that's bad, but still under "corruption", which is not what I, or the article is addressing.
A market maker who doesn't know if their counterparty is a Trump insider looking to fleece them must ask for a bigger safety margin to cover the risk they are taking -- and not just from the insiders. Honest participants in the market get taxed in order to provide the insider payout.
This is extremely basic incenive / money-flow tracing and "setting aside corruption" is a premise that has the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight up. It smells like someone looking to bake the hypothetical. Everyone before me in this conversation was right to be suspicious of your motives in asking it, and I am suspicious as well.
>A market maker who doesn't know if their counterparty is a Trump insider looking to fleece them must ask for a bigger safety margin to cover the risk they are taking -- and not just from the insiders. Honest participants in the market get taxed in order to provide the insider payout.
That's still corruption. Your argument about other participants being "taxed" applies for other sophisticated counterparties as well, eg. hedge funds with armies of analysts and can fly helicopters around to gather intel. Unless you want to say that's bad too, the only difference between the two is that the hedge fund isn't engaging in corruption.
The pacing of strategic military decisions being modulated to allow leading the futures market would be the very definition of "blood money".
I'm not sure what world we live in where being able to rent a helicopter implies hard work and not large amounts of preexisting wealth (generally taken by many to indicate at least some abuse of power, somewhere along the way).
Businesses require investment and a helicopter charter is probably less than a year of office space.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
It's a world where renting a helicopter is hilariously cheap available to some average person.
Looking at my local tourist helicopter place, a private custom flight is $1k per ~15m. That seems like nothing if it allows you be make millions with the information.
You can’t make millions from shorts unless you’ve already got millions to risk.
Shorts don't cost much to open, just the borrow rate on the shares. As long as it goes straight down you can leverage quite a bit without getting called.
Of course, this is the fastest way to lose your shirt and everything you have ever worked for, if there is any uncertainty.
Gee, what could go wrong using governmental info to provide personal gain? Surely they wouldn't be tempted to start causing situations to become reality for personal gain! (ala Dick Cheney and Halliburton.)
Politician are servants of the people, for the people. This involves sacrifice and following the law. (I realize this is a naive statement, but shouldn't we be jailing these law breakers?)
> like flying helicopters to look at how full oil storage tanks are
Unless the helicopter is dropping a bomb on a school on the way there (or back) I am not sure that the comparison is fair.
If the market wants to incentivize flying a helicopter to bring it information about the real world, that's somewhere between ok and good.
If the market wants to incentivize pumping and dumping the American economy by releasing a stream of fake news from the US President, that's bad.
We should tilt the arbitrary rules away from the bad things and towards the good things.
HN will never stop surprising me with it's takes on how it's okay to make money at anyone else's expense regardless of laws, ethics or harm done
> So if this sort of "insider trading" is bad, what does this mean for other sorts off strategies hedge funds do to get an edge, like flying helicopters to look at how full oil storage tanks are?
This is allowed because you've gotten that extra information through your own methods that in theory anyone else can get access to. The problem here is they're using information that nobody else could possibly have access to, therefore its "insider" trading and it's been illegal for a long time.
There are differences between the insider trading and your helicopter example. The theory is the better traders know the reality when making decisions, the better. When oil traders hide information about their reserves, they are working on creating a rift between the reality and the public knowledge. Helicopter is overcoming it. When Trump makes empty announcements that change prices in a purely speculative manner, but before doing this he buys futures, he is just creating instability on the market and he exploiting it. Instability is bad, the whole idea of futures is to deal with the risks stemming from the instability.
Instability is bad, but when the cause of it is market getting new information, it becomes ok: it is bad now, but it is good in the long term. But when the instability becomes a source of profits, when there are incentives and means to create the instability, then long term benefits go away.
Wait, those big oil tanks don’t have lids? Doesn’t that mean rain would mix with the oil??
AFAIK the lids "float" on top of the oil, probably to prevent vapors from building up if the tank is half full.
This kind of "well eksuallyyyy" argument isn't very useful or good faith when a systemic harm is highlighted. It's just contrarian muddying of the conversation.
>This kind of "well eksuallyyyy" argument
It's not, when the article is specifically arguing that the insider trading is bad beyond just corruption, and barely touches corruption. You don't get to tack on a weak claim on top of a strong claim, and then when the weak claim gets pushback fall back to the strong claim and say everything's fine because you're directionally correct, or claim the person pushing back is wrong because they're directionally incorrect.
I think Matt Levine’s take on this is best, in that the problem here is _theft_: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you-ha...
> The real issue is never whether the trading was unfair to the people on the other side; it’s whether the information was misappropriated from its rightful owners
In this case the rightful owners are the American public in whose employ the leakers are. They got this information from their position of trust, and sold that information, to the disadvantage of the people they work for.
Considering the very House, Senate, and connected buffoons with the presidency are all in on insider trading and corruption... Why shouldnt others?
Hell, being a congresscritter in charge of oversight of $industry allows you to cheat the public cause you know what's coming. How else do you see a senator making $174k/yr but net worth's of $100M? Its legal, only cause they carved their own exemptions and scam the public.
The numbers are big enough that I kind of suspect it's the various funds that are doing it. They've probably have some legal gray area intel they're leveraging like paying a guy who knows a guy overseas who knows a guy who's a l33t h4x0r (i.e. someone who got erroneously invited to a group chat).