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JP Morgan's Insider Trading How-To On Wikileaks
An anonymous reader writes "In an internal JP Morgan document published recently, Wikileaks exposes JPM's efforts to circumvent insider trading regulations, enabling their wealthy clients to profit even when others are losing. The document reads like a how-to and explains how to take advantage of SEC Rule 10b5-1, which has long been considered ripe for abuse. Now this abuse is publicly documented and will be hard to ignore."
On one hand I think this is good. Insider trading should not be illegal. To quote Milton Friedman:
"You want more insider trading, not less. You want to give the people most likely to have knowledge about deficiencies of the company an incentive to make the public aware of that."
The benefit of insider trading is information enters the markets quicker. That is good for me.
There are also tax lawyers who can help me create complex holding / offshore structures to make me pay less taxes, so from that point of view I fail to see the problem with help how to avoid insider trading regulations. No one would be surprised if these banks helped their clients to avoid paying specific corporate tax, for example. So what's so sacred about the insider trading regulations?
Anyhow, my problem I have with this is bad laws should be rewoked, not left in place to be circumvented with the right know-how.
Screw it being unethical; it is things like this which break the axioms that systems like markets are designed for.
.. so when it happens, it seems pretty obvious to me that you need to change the rules. If somebody is motivated and talented enough to earn wealth, they are the last people on earth who need an FAQ. Markets are intended to reward performance and promote capitalization, not provide and easier way for individuals to make money.
Ultimately, whats important is that if some people can circumvent the risk-reward aspect of an economic, political, judicial, or social system, they're basically saying they're above the protections that western civilization grants them.
I think ethics is a poor way to frame cases like this - the very people who say, "Well, its legal, so there you go" arn't interested in ethics, they're interested in gaming a system. That system would not exist if everyone was able to take advantage of the method of abusing it. Ultimately, they're acting in a way that would destroy the system were everyone able to do what they did. I think the idea of protecting the health of institutions is an easier sell to people than saying, "Hey, that's unethical." Lots of people do unethical things, every day - whats more important is pointing out where unethical behavior is rewarded by an institution rather than punished. These institutions are set up from the very start to attempt to mitigate unethical behavior
"Old man yells at systemd"
I absolutly agree about the fact that this information was interesting, and deserved awareness.
I am just saying that, if what they did boils down to finding the obscure *public* document or webpage which described that service, then they acted just as boinboing when it finds some cool looking roadsing in Japan: intersting, but not a leak.
And by acting as a news website, *even* as a stellarly good one, they would not be fullfying the role they claimed they would.
Which is a problem because what they claimed they would do is the only thing that serves to provide accountability to a service which GREATLY needs it.
Don't take me wrong; I think WIkileak is a wonderful thing; but because it is the embodiment of openess of information. Not because they are good at finding cool stuff
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
The only information that insider trading gives away, via the trade records, is that someone on the inside is selling a lot of stock - not their personal reasons why.
Insiders - people who typically have tons of stocks - will pump and dump, harming the company itself and leaving the small investors holding the bag.
After a few years of this going on, there won't be a single company out there, no matter how solid it is, that will survive this recurring, erratic cycle of binge & purge. Small investors, who constantly get burned time and time again, will lose faith in the system.
What happens next is fairly obvious.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
In itself, the services being offered by JP Morgan are perfectly legal and ethical; they are essentially a "collar", but with different instruments. They're a way of creating a position in which you're mostly immune to changes in the stock price. Wikileaks mentions this briefly by saying The techniques outlined in the 31-page document
So what I'm saying is that there isn't anything wrong with JP Morgan offering these services, period. There is a very practical and ethical reason to enter this sort of contract, and there are a number of safeguards to prevent insiders from large short-selling before things go bad. Nowhere does it even imply in the pdf that JP Morgan "wants to help you inside-trade and beat the market by 6%!"
Unfortunately, the 10b5 rules are not strict enough to prevent inside-traders from also using the services. It's still better than allowing insiders to trading around "blackout" dates.
Anyway, read the businessweek article; it will explain things better than I can. As for this story, it seems to me more of a case of someone offering legitimate services which are being abused by some bad apples.