Did HP Bilk Its Shareholders?

Posted by Soulskill on Friday September 16, 2011 @06:34AM from the all-about-the-benjamins dept.

jfruhlinger writes "About a month ago, HP announced that it was getting out of the PC, tablet, and mobile phone business to focus on software services, at which point, rather predictably, HP's stock plunged. Obviously, HP's leadership had been working on this plan for some time before it was announced, which leads to the question: did they deliberately mislead their stockholders by not being more transparent? That's what a shareholder lawsuit against the company alleges. How the courts treat the suit could have interesting implications for how transparent public corporations need to be about future strategy."

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Re:Insider trading by bws111 · 2011-09-16 07:07 · Score: 4, Informative

It's not if you knew about it and weren't supposed to, it's if you knew about and took action on that information, prior to the information being made public. Insiders obviously knew about the plan, but if they didn't use that information to buy or sell stock prior to the release of the information it is not insider trading.