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Mark Cuban Charged With Insider Trading
geekboy_x writes "The SEC today charged Mark Cuban with insider trading violations, alleging that he divested himself of stock in mamma.com before the stock was diluted via a public offering." Something tells me that the billionaire blogger won't be talking about this one publicly any time soon.
Twice in my career I have had a good laugh at the expense of someone whose abuse I suffered.
The first was David Duncan. He was a senior finance/accounting manager when I was a peon at Mobil. I basically had to jump at his every request even though I never worked for him or his department. I left that job to start an internet business, but I really enjoyed the day that I saw David Duncan testifying before Congress, explaining Enron to them. Beautiful day.
The second is today. When my internet company was encoding and streaming his sports and talk radio broadcasts (innovative for 1994, mind you), Mark Cuban used to page me and call me at home at all hours with the most unreasonable demands and questions. Now I realize if I had been willing to kiss his ass the way he was accustomed to being kissed, I might be a billionaire today, but it would never have happened. Today I am all smiles.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
That's crap on so many levels. But first, let's get you off your moral high-horse. Let's say you have a $100k worth of Intel stock (from super, or w/e retirement plan you have in your area). So anyway, you always Intel was a pretty solid stock, and got along with some Intel people.
Now let's say you're knocking back a few beers with your Intel buddy, and he tells you the i7 CPUs are failing en masse, the management is crumbling and AMD is poised to deliver a fatal blow. So in short, you are now in possession of insider information. So the question is, would you sell your stock or wait till you lose it?
Secondly, there's no stealing. You agreed, I agreed. We might have different information, but that's hardly a secret. And the person who is "more correct" will drive the market to correct itself. (See prediction markets).
A technical trading is evil? rofl I'm not even going to bother..
If you are a stockholder in a company, can the SEC consider you an insider under the law if an insider calls you and asks you to keep a secret?
So don't take his call or simply say, "La, La, La...I'm not listening!" when he tries to give you insider information.
This is a lawyer
Liberty.