Also, CAT is run by CATNMS, LLC which was created in response to an SEC rule 613, however it is operated by the same consortium of SROs that it purports to provide oversight on...
All these layers of responsibility diffusion and a notable absence of penalties for failing to meet rule 613 guidelines mean that rule is little more than for show.
rvba · 18d ago
The prosecutors dont need any spy tool to check who did the trade (at least officially). They can simply ask to receive the records / logs.
sebasv_ · 19d ago
What would determine whether the SEC will investigate for insider trading? I would expect them to be shielded from executive pressure.
tdb7893 · 19d ago
Who would be doing the shielding? The current US government has been operating under the assumption of an incredibly expansive executive power, even over "independent" agencies.
I'm not a legal expert at all but so far the most useful mental model has been to assume absolutely no one is shielded from executive power (including organizations and people entirely outside the federal government) unless the courts have delivered a final ruling on it.
mjd · 18d ago
How would a final court ruling shield someone from executive power? The court relies on the executive to enforce its decisions. They can find a person in contempt, and order fines or jail time until that person complies, but I believe the orders are then enforced by U.S. Marshals, who are executive appointees.
This is a serious question. What have I missed?
paulryanrogers · 18d ago
If the Marshalls neglect their oath to the Constitution (whether ordered to by superiors or not) then the court can deputize others to carry out court orders. IIUC correctly that's usually the police.
freeone3000 · 18d ago
I cannot overstate this enough: The police cannot be counted on to protect citizens against governmental overreach.
tdb7893 · 18d ago
I think there's no hard power stopping them but in general they've been reluctant to openly defy courts (they have defied lower courts some while claiming they haven't). I think at least adhering to some pretense of American democracy has so far been important to this administration and if they abandon that pretense carelessly they run a real risk of losing necessary support (popular support, Congressional support, but also support of executive branch institutions).
Also, it's not that I think they won't defy courts but they'll be very careful in doing it (well, at least as careful as this administration can be) so it's still a reasonable base assumption that court orders protect you since while it's not the ironclad protection it was it still gives you some protection for now. Though that "for now" is obviously rather ominous.
mjd · 14d ago
Do you still think so, after seeing them stonewall the courts in the Kilmar Abrego García case? To me it appears they a brazenly flouting the law.
pulisse · 19d ago
> I would expect them to be shielded from executive pressure.
In the past month the SEC has stopped most enforcement actions involving crypto.
hurtuvac78 · 19d ago
The president nominates the SEC chair, and can fire him.
This explains how, written just before Trump assumed power:
While he can't force Gensler to step down as a commissioner at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, he can name a new interim SEC chair as soon as he's inaugurated on Jan. 20. He can also nominate a new commissioner to the Senate, which has to confirm the pick.
"I would expect them to be shielded from executive pressure."
Such an expectation was rational prior to 2025-01-20. Since then it's been completely counterfactual.
hattmall · 18d ago
Questionable if there is anything to investigate, definitionally you can't inside trade an index fund.
Frost1x · 18d ago
If you’re POTUS or closely related to POTUS with access to sweeping information about erratic tariff policies that actual do shift entire markets index funds index against, why couldn’t you?
In general I think you’re correct because the “inside” information is typically not as broad or powerful. But I don’t think we live in general times. If POTUS gave me personally a heads up about such adjustments on tariffs, after watching indexes tumble after announcing them, and knowing the opposite direction, I would dump almost everything I had access to in such stocks largely effected by reevaluation from tariffs.
Knowing major policy shifts before they happen from one of the powerful governments in the world is useful information, especially when the policies are being set by a handful of people who can limit access to knowledge escaping even more than regularly so markets don’t adjust from larger sets of insider information.
Now is it really considered “insider” trading in this case? Probably not, and this administration can get away with anything it seems.
spwa4 · 17d ago
That's the whole point. It CANNOT have been someone inside all 500 companies. It wouldn't make much sense because those companies did not do anything at the time. It was president Trump's tweet that moved the market. So it can only have been someone that new of Trump's announcement hours before he made that announcement.
rco8786 · 18d ago
Why would you expect that?
daedrdev · 19d ago
In this administration they will be fired for cases Trump doesnt like. Who would protect their independence, Congress? The house members will not oppose any trump policy unless the US is in a depression due to his action
vkou · 18d ago
At this point, it's not clear that they would oppose him dropping a nuclear bomb on Ohio.
ourmandave · 18d ago
Well, if there was a hurricane headed to Toledo, it could be justified.[0]
All depends on if it's in the storm path drawn by the Presidential Sharpie.
[0] First Trump threatened to nuke hurricanes. Now he’s waging war on weather forecasters
SEC is a federal agency so falls under the Executive which is controlled by Trump. Trump will fire any SEC employee who investigates the "wrong" people and install a loyalist in their place.
EasyMark · 17d ago
This is the truth, they have been recently divesting of anyone who wants to prosecute for white collar crime. The next four years will see at least one trillionaire because he/she will be able to game the system without any barriers because the sheriff is also the criminal.
mullingitover · 19d ago
No economic system is functional without a bunch of compromises, and capitalism needs strong regulations as a check to keep it from turning absolutely rotten.
We're witnessing the removal of all of the guardrails, traffic signals, road maintenance crews. The highway patrols have been replaced by organized teams of highwaymen.
It'll get a lot worse before it gets better.
consumer451 · 19d ago
I recently read someone's comment here stating that "trust is efficient."
What we are witnessing is the devolution of the USA from a high-trust to low-trust business environment. "Low-trust business environment" is the euphemism we have used to describe other countries, where corruption is rampant. This is so sad to watch.
rapnie · 19d ago
Not just sad to watch. Would a country with a low-trust business environment be allowed to have such a huge mountain of government debt, and continue to have its currency be the world's reserve currency? A lot of sadness hinges on those considerations.
radicalbyte · 19d ago
I'm pretty sure that the damage is done. It will take a few years, maybe even a decade, but the USD will no longer be the defacto reserve currency.
cft · 19d ago
there's no reason for the USD to be the reserve currency, being the currency of a country that doesn't produce anything anymore
dlkmp · 19d ago
But does provide services the entire world depends on.
exe34 · 19d ago
it's the other way round, the military maintains the world order, the currency is used as reserve, and they get to provide services that nobody else can provide while they're top dog. they are not on a trajectory to remain top dog for very long.
cft · 19d ago
there's no reason that one government should control that currency.
evrydayhustling · 18d ago
Trust was its own reason. It's useful for the whole world to have a currency and business environment that operates by rules, even when the rules aren't perfect or fair.
That environment isn't being outcompeted by better, more fair rules - it's just getting vandalized for a few people's gain, and creating risk for everyone else .
EasyMark · 17d ago
there's what you think, and then there is reality.
lazide · 18d ago
I remember when everyone said the Euro was the new reserve currency - even a Bond film used it as a plot point.
Came to nothing.
2muchcoffeeman · 18d ago
But things can change no? Like the country whose currency we use becoming untrustworthy. Do you think the world watched the first trump presidency and thought to do nothing?
radicalbyte · 18d ago
It was US policy to actively work against that and it was an acceptable deal for us given that we've been friends and allies forever. Now Trump has turned the US into our heroin-addict sibling we can no longer rely on them.
lazide · 18d ago
So they’re going to…. Be nicer now? Less crazy?
EasyMark · 17d ago
But at that point in time the USA wasn't run by a clown show of grifting circus performers.
impossiblefork · 19d ago
Those particular aspects are only good for Americans though. That those two things are ending is good for basically everybody else, from Brazilians, Chinese and Canadians to Frenchmen.
rapnie · 18d ago
The speed with which things are ending are most important I think. For decades there has been a slow decline in US power. Today we have the BRICS trade block representing more than half of the world's population. And countries hold a basket of reserve currencies, where the dollar is still a large percentage, but not nearly as large as it used to be. If all these pillars of American empire are carelessly self-destructed, crashing the world order, it will be hugely disruptive. It forces other powers to act and move to occupy the power vacuum, while lacking the economic weapons may force US'es hand to engage with military force, to reestablish itself.
Ray20 · 18d ago
>Today we have the BRICS trade block representing more than half of the world's population.
As far as I understand, the BRICS block does not actually exist. I mean, being member of it does not mean anything serious. There are no obligations, no agreements, no roadmaps. We might as well talk about a alliance of countries whose names begin with the letter "S"
impossiblefork · 18d ago
I really don't agree. Rather, the 2015-2024 period has seen a huge increase in US GDP relative to the EU, which is probably largely driven by the US ability to spend, due to these particular things.
Of course, countries like China are catching up anyway-- they're more than a billion people and very able, and of course, people are working hard to get out of this arrangement. I agree that it will be disruptive, but I think the crash has been in the making for years.
When US interest rates went from 1% to 4.5-5% without a drop in stock prices or a corresponding increasing in dividends I could only interpret that as pure irrationality, and even now companies like Tesla still have P/E ratios of 133.54 whereas excellent firms in the same business-- Volkswagen and Toyota have P/E ratios 3.24 and 6.21 respectively. I'm surprised it still hasn't gone through the floor. The traders by trading at these prices are implicitly assuming interest rates will go back to <1% without any drop in earnings, and that won't happen.
mullingitover · 17d ago
> When US interest rates went from 1% to 4.5-5% without a drop in stock prices
The Dow crashed from ~36k to ~28k in less than a year, and that decrease in value doesn't account for inflation. Adjusting for inflation I don't think the markets have actually fully reached their late 2021 peak.
yencabulator · 17d ago
Agreed otherwise but
s/forces other powers/makes other powers want to/
s/force US/make US want to/
Starting wars is not something forced upon a country, and that's ungood doublespeak.
StormChaser_5 · 18d ago
Not sure that's true. America's military keeps peace for trade to happen in a lot of the world... Not always successfully but it's there. That works because they have the reserve currency and can therefore print money for free. Which benefits the US greatly in all sorts of ways. But everyone else also sees some good. If that goes away its going to have impacts on everyone else as well as America. Maybe not as much of an impact on the rest of the world but this is not good for anyone.
I can get the anger at the way the US acts, particularly over the last couple of weeks, but that doesn't mean that them doing badly helps the rest of us
impossiblefork · 18d ago
I really don't think we do.
France and Britain alone used to be able to defend trade routes. I don't think it's a huge expense. It really is good for essentially everyone aside from the US itself, once the disruption is over. Obviously we'll have some kind of crash though, but I think that was inevitable with or without this.
enraged_camel · 18d ago
>> France and Britain alone used to be able to defend trade routes. I don't think it's a huge expense.
That was a different world. France and Britain today have nowhere the kind of force projection the USA does, via its military bases and aircraft carriers.
impossiblefork · 18d ago
Yes, but the US basically had to intervene and tell them to stop using it. If that hadn't happened they wouldn't have.
The US probably wasn't in preventing an invasion of Egypt, but if not restrained I'm sure that Britain and France could have realised their objectives, and if they had had a continuous need to realise different changing objectives they would have retained more capability.
dragonwriter · 18d ago
> France and Britain alone used to be able to defend trade routes. I don't think it's a huge expense
France and Britain used to be two of the world's largest imperial powers, and at any time you could plausibly claim France and Britain alone could defend global trade routes, Britain, at least, still was.
You really aren't making a case for it being an easy, cheap job.
impossiblefork · 18d ago
Yes, but I think they can basically still do it. If they hadn't been buying F-35s they'd presumably have pushed their stealth fighter projects to be finished by now, and what more is really required?
I think these trade routes etc. will stop mattering rather soon. Batteries are coming and once that's here the oil trade's gone, and then you have no need to export things to get something to trade for it, so in a decade or so none of this will matter.
International trade will go from being mandatory to optional, and thus become much less important.
dboreham · 18d ago
I don't think that's completely true. Wasn't the US Navy founded (by a Scotsman of course) because the US at the time lacked the funds to pay off the pirates? European countries did pay them off, hence didn't need as large navies.
mistrial9 · 18d ago
isn't this ancient history now? the formations in the last 50 years are large
consumer451 · 18d ago
I agree. I would argue that Pax Americana has been pretty great for even the USA's supposed "arch enemies." My gut feeling is that everyone loved that stability, whether friend or foe, and the fact that it's now gone will mess everyone up.
I am biased here, but I look forward to the next century of Pax Europa. This is the only way forward.
CuriouslyC · 18d ago
Europe isn't playing aggressively enough or really doing enough to innovate. China is in a position to reap a huge windfall from Trump putting the US in the dumpster. China will bring Europe into the fold with the promise of gradual reforms, and they'll win the global south with soft power and trade agreements.
My fear is that Trump sees America's position eroding quickly relative to China before his eyes and decides to do something an order of magnitude dumber than anything he's done before.
lazide · 18d ago
If you really think the US is going to just, what, retire all that military equipment you haven’t been paying attention.
consumer451 · 18d ago
Disclaimer: As it turns out, predicting the future is somewhat difficult.
However, in isolationist MAGA, the US military is just a jobs program. This is plain facts, is it not?
The other major power of the USA, post-WWII, was "soft power." That has now been cancelled. So, I am really not sure what is happening.
I once thought that "may you live in interesting times" was a blessing. I now believe that this saying is a curse.
lazide · 18d ago
So you’re saying Greenland and Canada have nothing to worry about?
20after4 · 16d ago
It was always a curse.
eastbound · 18d ago
I know I’ll be downvoted but, since we’re going straight for scorched land, I prefer to voice it.
I think most voters think like me “I still prefer Trump to a leftist government”:
- Was there any need to be so extreme in terms of wokeness on the left? I am directly threatened by their program. Was there really any need to go for such a degree of revolution, ensuring everyone sensical would vote Trump? Could the left imagine being a little more democratic and making a few more concessions towards… omg, white males? Is it such a bane? It’s concessions for white males, or we vote for Trump, so did the left win anything with their scorched earth policy?
- It is true that savings needed to be done. The left refused to do any, and went to raise the public programs, reaching a few trillion debt per semester. At one point this has to stop, and the left ain’t gonna stop by itself, so the left provokes the people into voting for the only one who will stop public spending and, yes, he comes in, and has the bad role of taking the US to the cleaners. You will say “It doesn’t even save money” and whatsnot, but would the left have saved the money by themselves? No. Never. So someone else came in and saved for them.
This entire movement is a reactionary movement to the left. The left makes no concessions. So both sides go for a scorched earth policy.
What have we learned? What have we won, on either sides?
Do we agree that, staying closed-minded as they are, the left will resume public spendings by the trillions the moment they step into power? Do we agree that the left is a direct threat to meritocracy, stability of government, men in marriage, men at work, a direct threat to men’s financial stability, and that no-one on the left cares even a little what others-than-them feel?
tmcb · 18d ago
> I am directly threatened by their program. […] Could the left imagine being a little more democratic and making a few more concessions towards… omg, white males?
I am not from the US, I am originally from Latin America. I am considered a “white male” there. I am now living in Europe as I am a dual citizen. This kind of position is interesting to me. What is so bad about being a white male in the USA at the moment?
I’d like to elaborate further, but I want to engage in an honest conversation so I would like to hear your opinion.
No comments yet
slopslop · 18d ago
As a white male from northern europe, I learned during the most left recent years that I’m responsible for all the world’s injustices and ethnic/gender/sexual preference defines a human. I can see why so many gave a protest vote when the current system was trying to paint their existence as non-desirable. We went decades backward and this all just brought the focus back to our insignificant external factors like skin color.
I don’t support extreme right or their hate but it looked a lot like categorical hate against my “kind” that I didn’t have part in choosing.
What got me writing is that is debt actually so bad or is it like leveraged investment? If US would have chosen a bit more professional leader capable to at least maintain the position in world economy, the debt wouldn’t likely ever have to be paid off.
tmcb · 18d ago
> I’m responsible for all the world’s injustices and ethnic/gender/sexual preference defines a human.
Rest assured you are not. But this could turn out to be true, maybe in a very minor way, the moment your resentment towards this straw man becomes the main driver of your political views.
2muchcoffeeman · 18d ago
This is what the US "left" got wrong though. Reality or not, there is a strong perception that what these guys are saying is true. I could not fault someone looking at any media whether social or traditional from coming to this conclusion. I think Andrew Tate is a direct symptom of this. He simply filled a void in confused young men's lives. You can point to data saying that there is still inequality all you like, but you need to deal with the current sentiment too. The left is as responsible for Trump as the ultra right.
Americans literally thought that this extremely easy to bribe, criminal, serial adulterer, whose is most likely trying to undermine your constitution (I expect all you 2nd amendment supporters to stop touting that) was a reasonable choice.
tmcb · 18d ago
I know this is not an accurate portrayal of your point, but this sounds very much like the “the left needs its own Joe Rogan” argument to me.
The problem with it is that we delegate the duties towards our fellow citizens to the talking heads on TV or in our algorithmic feeds and wash our hands on it—I say “we” because it has been happening in basically every country at this point.
If democracy has failed, as some people love to say, it was not because it was supposed to fail, but because politicians have successfully managed to replace it by the current series of popularity contests we have in place.
2muchcoffeeman · 18d ago
I think that you came to the conclusion that there needs to be a counter to Joe Rogan says a lot.
I’m only suggesting that you deal with the feelings people are having. Which were ignored. They’re right about that.
BTW, I don’t think Joe Rogan is as bad as people think he is. All you democrats should have gone on his show.
tmcb · 18d ago
No, sorry, I didn’t make myself clear. I said that I disagree with that take. Maybe you are not familiar with it, which is something that was raised by some people (maybe jokingly, I don’t know, but it made the rounds in left-wing social media).
I agree that the left should address young men’s struggles, namely the working class, but maybe not in the same sense you are implying. They are as responsible for their own political choices as anyone else.
[P.S.: Am I not from the US. How could I be a Democrat?]
2muchcoffeeman · 17d ago
Apologies for misunderstanding you.
Epa095 · 18d ago
Damn, as another nordic male, why did nobody tell me?
I noticed that someone in America said so, but the US had been extreme, in all ways, for many years and no sane person takes the stuff coming from there as gospel.
I am not responsible for 'all the world’s injustices', and nobody had tried to make me. Maybe if I spend some time on YouTube I can find someone at an American college thinking so, or a right-wing podcast saying that people think so about me. But that is not the mainstream here.
DemocracyFTW2 · 18d ago
There's no "leftist" party in the USA, there's a Conservative Party called the Democrats, and there's an Ultraconservative Party that's now hellbound to become a Fascist Party called the Republican Party.
FranzFerdiNaN · 18d ago
Do you also post on the /r/conservative subreddit? Because you should if you do not, you will find many likeminded people who are completely down the rabbit hole.
fabian2k · 18d ago
They're not saving money so far, they have been spending more money than the government spent in 2024. And in those cases where they will spend less they also did enormous damage, e.g. cancelling clinical trials midway through. This is pure destruction, not efficiency.
And your woke argument is a pure strawman. What were those extreme positions by Kamala Harris?
eastbound · 18d ago
The “Trump is doing the opposite of his program” yields no constructive argument. Because voting for the opposite movement wouldn’t have made the left suddenly implement meritocratic capitalism.
hansvm · 18d ago
Why, exactly, isn't that a constructive argument?
eastbound> We need Trump because the economy is in the shitter
fabian2k> He's actually making it worse
eastbound> Well, the other side wouldn't have made it better
How do you get to have it both ways -- the economy is important enough that we need Trump, but Trump is more important despite ruining it?
miramba · 18d ago
> wokeness on the left… I am directly threatened by their program.
Could you please explain what that threat is exactly, and what kind of “concessions to white males” you would have in mind?
eastbound · 18d ago
I’ll candidly assume that this is not a rhetorical question aimed at making me pass as a spoiled child, as is frequent with leftism:
- AOC, known as “the squad” (!), has claimed the Congress has too many white males. President Macron said the same about the US tech sector, and he’s not even part of the extremists, so this issue permeates society. Basically everyone says white men should be fewer of them. This is a direct threat.
- Feminism was supposed to give women more place at work and give family a better representation of both genders at home. What happened: Men can’t apply for some jobs anymore; while men are assumed to not merit to see the children by default at home. This has been going on since the 1980 in every developed country, moreso in France and US, a little less in Sweden. Judges and lawyer family courts are often 100%-women (80.2% in the profession).
- We helped women when they were 38% of the university students. But they crossed the 50% in 1990. Men now represent 39% of university students. Do we help them? No, we drop help programs. And Sweden also dropped equality programs the moment men were in need.
This is what various groups have been militanting for years, but they were harassed into submission by the left (from Facebook’s pro-left censorship at the time, to directly burning their cars or killing their dogs, and of course cancelling conference centers for men support groups which they presented as extremists - which is true, men are angry).
How is Trump helping?
- His program basis is based on a meritocratic econonic theory (that does not favour women, which is all the left complains about), but, granted, elected presidents generally implement another program, and Trump isn’t helping much,
- Men thrive in both meritocracies and in the wilderness/lawlessness, because they work more. To this, Trump has choosen the latter. The more economic crisis there is is, the weaker the government, and the more women will need men. Given the left’s program is “let’s take men’s/white’s people money”, the scorched earth is the best situation.
Granted, it would be nicer if leftists didn’t hate white men’s guts so much that they could listen to them when they make reasonable demands such as equity in family courts or meritocracy at the workplace. Barring being sensible…
tmcb · 18d ago
If you are eating too many carbs and you go to the doctor and he says "you should be eating way less carbs", he is not necessarily telling you to quit all carbs from your diet cold turkey.
It is safe to say that men are ~50% of any country's demographics. If you find any position of power and prestige where they are over-represented, it is safe to assume that there is an imbalance. People will come up with excuses for such imbalance, but one cannot deny that there is such an imbalance there.
mistrial9 · 18d ago
this is called Identity Politics.. basing your judgement of other adults by their demographic classifications.. Replacing skills-based and merit-based promotion with "balancing" is racist and sexist in a polar opposite way from the historical trajectory. This parent statement is part of the unrepentant position of many in the USA. This position lost at multiple levels in a massive open election in the USA.
tmcb · 18d ago
It is actually the opposite. I assume there is no inherent reason why people from other demographics with the required skills and merit cannot be found. Otherwise, there must be a reason why they can’t, and people who think that the current imbalance is perfectly good must have a pretty reasonable explanation to that. Do you have any?
klipt · 18d ago
So will the government mandate that 50% of stay at home parents be men?
Because as the other poster pointed out, if you push men out of the workplace and out of family life (by favoring custody for women) you just end up with a bunch of unemployed idle men, which is a recipe for revolution.
And if 50/50 is the goal, where is the government push for more men in places where they're underrepresented, like university students, nurses, teachers?
tmcb · 18d ago
I can’t reply to your other comment for some reason.
You got me, I did not express myself well. I should have said “working people”. I framed it as a women’s issue since you said that the solution to that would be forcing men to trade places with them.
Re: the fact that bringing up men’s issues is kind of taboo to the left, it seems more of a language problem. If you frame it as a “war on men”, that will turn people off. If you say: “look, there are many bright young guys who could be on college that are otherwise deciding to look for work because the economy is not so great”… Maybe people will listen.
Edit: maybe they will reply “EKSUSE MEE??? WHY NOT WOMEN???”. That is obnoxious, I get it. But do they have a point? If you think so, concede. If you do n’t think so, I would like to know more about it. That is what politics is about.
About 40% of male domestic violence victims who seek help are accused of being the abuser.
Completely coincidentally I'm sure, the federal law on domestic violence is called the "Violence Against Women Act", which furthers the bias that men can't be victims.
How would you improve the situation for male victims without making people on the left hate you?
The same people who say that "firemen" is sexist, will hypocritically say that the naming of the law isn't sexist.
tmcb · 18d ago
Well, certainly not by threatening to cut funding of humanities research grants. Otherwise they won't be able to conduct research such as this one... But I digress.
The "Violence Against Women Act" is from 1994. Most statistics of that time pointed to a disproportionate amount of women being victims of domestic violence in comparison to men. I tried to find more recent statistics, but this is a very serious topic, so it deserves to be treated with more caution. Also, this is one of the reasons why I think it should not be used as a "war on men" talking point. Do we want to solve the darn problem or use it as a weapon against political opponents?
klipt · 18d ago
Well most serious work injuries happen to men, but if we had a "Work Safety For Men" act I bet you'd call that sexist. A law that fails to protect male victims of violence is equally sexist.
The double standard is very visible. Maybe you should just admit that the left is blatantly the "party of women's interests" and give up on gaining men's votes.
tmcb · 18d ago
The OSH Act was passed in 1970. I wonder why it doesn't have "for men" in its name...
This policy was very effective, in the first place. I could eyeball a 70% reduction in the period between 1972 and 2019.
Can it be reduced it even further? Probably.
Would I find it off-puting if any piece of legislation is eventually passed that addresses a hypothetical issue that is disproportionally faced by men and helps reduce it even further? Certainly not.
(I, for one, would approve of the "No More Balls Stuck in the Cogs Act".)
The left believes that any metric where women are worse off needs urgent attention, and any intervention must prioritize women.
But any metric where men are worse off can either be ignored, or fixed with an intervention that is either gender neutral, or preferably, prioritizes women again.
The left is the Party of Women.
tmcb · 18d ago
Yes, that sounds like the perfect conversation starter.
If that doesn't work, which I believe is highly unlikely, maybe try incorporating elements of speech as those found in this right-wing publication, the World Socialist Web Site: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/02/27/hefl-f27.html
klipt · 18d ago
Your link just proves my point: 0 mention anywhere that the majority of work fatalities are men.
If the majority of work fatalities were women, we'd be screaming from the rooftops that "workplaces are unsafe for women"
tmcb · 18d ago
Oh, my bad. I thought that the names and pictures of the deceased 66-year-old man and 16-year-old boy would be enough.
I guess we can brush this one under the carpet, right? Nothing to see here. Workplace fatalities are a serious issue, but not so serious to you that it is worth bridging that gap. Maybe I’m wrong. Feel free to correct me if that is the case.
On the other hand, I acknowledge that men are disproportionately affected by this issue and that it deserves serious attention from both left and right. I would wholeheartedly support their demand of better working conditions from their employers and representatives, and advise them to contact the media so that the general public can be informed of that and, who knows, maybe support unionization if their demands are not met. Do you think this is a reasonable stance, or do you see any problems with that?
tmcb · 18d ago
Also, are you available to organize so that we could bring some consciousness to the public about how men are disproportionately affected by workplace fatalities in developed countries? The condition being that we first agree on the causes leading to it.
We could start with the resources we have already found on the Internet. I can pay for the domain if you are interested.
tmcb · 18d ago
> So will the government mandate that 50% of stay at home parents be men?
Well, obviously not. But there is always the caveat that suggesting government providing adequate child care to working women is communism of whatever. Is it feasible to have some compromise here?
> And if 50/50 is the goal, where is the government push for more men in places where they're underrepresented, like university students, nurses, teachers?
This sounds like a perfectly legitimate ask if young men do really care about it. Why not contact your local representative and explain the issue in an articulate manner?
klipt · 18d ago
> government providing adequate child care to working women
You see this is the bias on the left, that everything must be framed as "for women". If the childcare is only for "working women", will a single dad not be able to access it?
Why not government providing adequate child care to working people?
> Why not contact your local representative and explain the issue in an articulate manner?
I do, but your have to admit there is a chilling effect in left wing spaces where openly supporting men's issues makes you very unpopular.
mindslight · 18d ago
> The more economic crisis there is is, the weaker the government, and the more women will need men
So, to put a finer point on it - you decided that aiming to destroy the United States, and the Pax Americana underlying western civilization, was an appropriate response because AOC and Macron (who represent "everyone", in your apparent media diet) hurt your feelings. As a fellow man, this is just pathetic and entitled.
There have always been groups in society you cannot criticize. There has always been groupthink bullshit that you just smile and nod, and then later share your real thoughts with your trusted close friends. The growing prevalence of talking about men's rights issues was the painstaking path to them getting better - there are some pretty harsh biological reasons why custody courts are slanted towards women, right? If you really wanted to phrase this in terms of "men", then maybe you needed to listen to your fellow wiser men telling you to hold your nose and vote conservative/democrat instead of lashing out with histrionic destruction. Alas.
tomp · 18d ago
You’re forgetting that the previous government was losing at least 2 wars (in Ukraine and against Houties) and destroying the United States - trying to jail political opponents, subverting elections, destroying the country’s borders, erasing meritocracy, instituting censorship and ignoring Supreme Court rulings.
mindslight · 18d ago
Those topics weren't in the scope of the original discussion and I'm not really interested in litigating partisan entertainment propaganda based around taking shreds of truth (at best) and blowing them out of proportion.
The large scale facts are that under the previous administration we had working relationships with our allies, mostly functional executive agencies (aka law enforcement), and the US (ie USD) was seen as a source of stability. Meanwhile the current administration's actions are indistinguishable from a foreign power doing its best to destroy our country - we are now isolated from our allies (and even seen as hostile!), the ideal of rule of law has been replaced by brazenly corrupt rule by law, and we're staring down dedollarization.
Smarten up, quick.
tomp · 18d ago
“My side is the truth, your side is partisan propaganda.”
Bottom line is, people see goals / intentions differently, especially in politics!
mindslight · 18d ago
ah, postmodern relativism. Is there anything it won't destroy?
miramba · 17d ago
It wasn't rethorical and I appreciate your extensive answer. Being male myself, I can relate to some of the points you made. But I don't feel threatened. I guess there is a wide range of the meaning of this word, but I would describe it as perceiving a danger to ones life, livelihood, happiness or something. I did not experience any more disadvantages from being male than being young or old, short, brown-eyed, not too smart, overweight etc.
And your reasonable demands...are you seriously at a workplace where meritocracy is lived? Ever? Out of the many different non-meritocratic factors that come into play in a workplace, being male certainly was never in the top 10 for me. If anything it was an advantage. I'm sorry if you had different experiences. It's not true, where I live, that men can't apply for certain jobs, and I doubt that is the reality for you. The usual term is "everything else equal, a female candidate will be preferred", which is just an encouragement to women to apply. If you want the male candidate, you always find a reason that he is not equal to the female applicant. So if you have the feeling that you didn't get a job because you are male - perhaps it was because the female candidate was better.
And those recurring "leftist", "leftism" references make your statements a bit biased. The time to put everything in left and right categories is somewhat last century. It's all more complicated than that. Nobody hates you because your male and white. But it sure sounds a bit whiny what you are complaining about - imagine you'd be black and female, you really think you would be in a better position, you would have an advantage then? Come on.
The left’s arguments are unfortunately a collection of your argument: Refuting entirely-developed speeches because of a single sentence missing one word.
netsharc · 18d ago
Trump and meritocracy? You are insane. Oh, Hegseth the wife-(and alcohol-)abusing TV-presenter should be in charge the world's most powerful military? Brett Kavanaugh, who in the balance of probability did assault that woman, should be forced into the supreme court (even blocking the FBI investigation)? You're just going to excuse these flaws away, aren't you?
To be honest, this thread has shown what weak fragile egos some white men have. So your kind has had it easy for centuries. Yeah, probably the rhetoric that's made you "the enemy" is really dumb (hey it poisoned the mind of the richest man in the world, for one), but what do you expect, mollycoddling?
Hah, maybe the whole (white) world should have a truth-and-reconciliation committee, where men are invited to discuss their privilege, and what can be changed to make an equal world. (Actually not just white, men all over the world have had this tyranny. Then again maybe it's just the animal/biological nature that we shouldn't just suppress). But even with "committee", there'll be weak egos screaming about the tyranny against them. A bit like states wanting to hide away the civil war from their education, or not even allowing discussion about systemic racism or "critical race theory" (uh oh sorry if that triggers you, if I were mocking you I'd call you a snowflake now).
afpx · 18d ago
My wife likes to tell me that she'll know when feminism has succeeded when the US Supreme Court is all women. I tell her that I'll know when feminism has succeeded when the military is all women.
netsharc · 18d ago
I do admit the existence of insanely moronic arguments that are sometimes made. "As a woman you have to vote for Hillary because she's a woman.". What a dumb argument, that's still identity politics. If the choice was between someone like female Sarah Palin that wants government control of women's bodies, because she thinks the Bible should trump the constitution vs. a man who would respect the separation of church and state (e.g. the catholic Biden who nevertheless supported Roe v. Wade), would a woman have to still be obliged to vote for Palin?
afpx · 18d ago
The power is right there, ready to be taken. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to wait for the “white man” to grant you more power. But, to do so, you will need to risk more than your online reputation.
netsharc · 18d ago
Huh, let's just forget that women had to e.g. fight for the right to vote, or the whole civil rights movement... OK, fine, it's 2025, and let's see, is the discrimination that's in people's heads about "what's normal" totally gone? I can admit that if you ask me to imagine a CEO, I'd imagine a middle-aged white man, am I the only one? And what does this image of normality do to the idea of who will be picked for a particular job, by a group of people?
Yeah if I'm looking for a caretaker for my child, a male candidate would also make me go "Huh, interesting". Women have the advantage for this job, and men have it for the CEO job, I wonder which job is more powerful in the world (if we don't pull out a philosophical idea of "powerful"...).
klipt · 18d ago
> feminism has succeeded when the military is all women.
*when the draft is all women, but men are allowed to serve voluntarily
siffl · 18d ago
The reason that military forces tend to be composed mostly of men is for two very practical reasons:
1. Men are on average physically stronger than women, and at their peak are physically stronger than is possible for any woman. This is more useful in a combat situation.
2. Women's bodies are specialized for pregnancy and childbirth. Without women providing this essential function, the next generation of humanity would not exist. By contrast, men are more disposable because all they do is provide the sperm.
A society where almost all women have been killed in battle cannot effectively repopulate, as there is a bottleneck of pregnancy: it is a long process that - excluding relatively rare cases of multiple births - requires one woman per newborn to conduct. A society where almost all men have been killed can repopulate much more rapidly, as it only takes a small number of men to fulfil the male reproductive role of providing sperm.
In fact the existence of sperm banks makes the widespread obliteration of males even less of a risk to the survival of humanity. Plus there is a promising subfield of stem cell research on growing viable sperm from female cells, which would remove the reliance upon males entirely.
fabian2k · 18d ago
Whatever Trump is doing is the opposite of a meritocracy. He's hired a lot of entirely unqualified people, the only thing he values is loyalty.
master-lincoln · 18d ago
What left are you talking about? The Democratic Party in the USA would be seen as neo-liberals too from outside the US. Calling it "the left" just shows how delusional the society in the USA seems to have become...
rapnie · 18d ago
The whole left/right thing has been weaponised to distract from the up/down, top/bottom real issue.
labster · 18d ago
I agree, but I would also like to add that the Republican Party is not a conservative party, either. Trump brags about raising taxes on so many imports. And the current administration never saw a Chesterton’s fence they didn’t want to tear down. The party as a whole seems to be pretty happy with it.
So that’s America, no options if you want to vote for a liberal party or a conservative party.
eastbound · 18d ago
> The Democratic Party in the USA would be seen as neo-liberals too from outside the US
Incorrect: This is an old argument from the left to pretend that US leftism isn’t very left.
Truth: The US government is in debt of 6 trillion per year, which makes it the most powerful government of the world. The right’s “Atlas Shrugged” vision is to have a very lean government, as in, weak and powerless as possible.
Conclusion: The American left wing proposes to build a government bigger than any socialist country in the world.
Correlation: Ironically, the leftists are often anti-war and they’d be much better defended if they supported defunding the US government to the point they couldn’t wage war outside their borders. The left should support Elon Musk ;) </s>
Epa095 · 18d ago
OP should have said that "The Democratic Party in the USA IS seen as neo-liberals too from outside the US".
There is obviously multiple axises you can place the left/right on. If you want to define anyone who accepts debt as 'left', and thus the USA is leftish then... ok whatever floats your boat. Just be aware that the rest of the world sees concepts like universal healtcare and education as more important than how much debt you accept. Using debt to pay for a huge military and unsustainable low taxes is not a typical leftish view.
const_cast · 18d ago
> The right’s “Atlas Shrugged” vision is to have a very lean government, as in, weak and powerless as possible.
This is objectively not true of the right's actions. If you read Project 2025 or just look at the legislation/EOs passed, the right is currently trying to expand the power of the president to unprecedented levels. In addition, they're trying to undermine the checks and balances of the courts such that the government can make greater decisions faster.
This isn't a small government, it's teetering on fascism. The fascism analogs only grow greater when you here Trump speak of an enemy within, who must be eliminated. When he speaks as if he is the One True answer to every problem facing the US. Trump-ism is become more akin to a cult than a political platform, many people just following Trump because they view him a God. It's a bit spooky. It's very difficult to not draw parallels to fascist leaders of the past.
> Conclusion: The American left wing proposes to build a government bigger than any socialist country in the world.
Delusional, sorry. If you think the democrats, the ultra-capitalist right-leaning party, want to create a socialist country you are just delusional. I don't know how to help you there because it's just not in touch with reality.
There's, like, 2 representatives in all of the Democratic party who could maybe kind of be consider democratic-socialists. And there's a better chance of hell freezing over than those 2 convincing the other hundreds to go their way.
After a certain point, we have to come back down to Earth and acknowledge what is actually going on, instead of whatever we have allowed our minds to concoct.
const_cast · 18d ago
> making a few more concessions towards… omg, white males?
I'm a white man. We already HAVE all the concessions. There's nothing left to give us. I mean, we're not gonna implement anti-racist stuff against white men because there does not exist any racism against white men. Ergo, that policy is defacto implemented.
White men also don't need DEI because we actually already have DEI. Studies show upwards of 50% increase in likelihood of being hired if you're white.
I mean, look at Trump's cabinet and admin. Full of white men... because they are white men. A lot of them are very unqualified.
> It is true that savings needed to be done.
This administration will only raise the deficit.
Also, the left at least admitted that taxes on the ultra-wealthy need to be raised. The Trump administration is continuing to raise YOUR taxes while cutting theirs. So, to recap: higher taxes for you, a greater deficit, and the programs will be cut. Wow, it's a lose-lose-lose! Almost impressive how shit conservative policy is.
> This entire movement is a reactionary movement to the left.
I applaud your honesty in admitting the reactionary nature of American conservatives.
However, you're incorrect in saying they're reacting to the left. They're not. They're reacting to a made-up version of the left. One formed and imagined through decades of conservative propaganda. One where the left are communists, baby eaters, and reptilians - not the reality, where the democratic party is a right-leaning ultra-capitalist party.
> Do we agree that, staying closed-minded as they are, the left will resume public spendings by the trillions the moment they step into power? Do we agree that the left is a direct threat to meritocracy, stability of government, men in marriage, men at work, a direct threat to men’s financial stability, and that no-one on the left cares even a little what others-than-them feel?
Uh, no.
drekipus · 19d ago
Roots of which started way back earlier than 2001 even..
consumer451 · 18d ago
Personally, I would argue that the corruption afterburner kicked in with Citizens United v. FEC.
This was like giving a crack addict a feedback loop which gives them more crack. Of course it was going to end badly.
We could discuss many possible points of inflection, but I don't want to dilute the undeniable power of the phrase "trust is efficient."
However we got here, whatever one's politics, you cannot argue against that simple phrase, and the tragedy of the loss.
Yet Kamala and her supporting PACs had two or three times the funding that Trump had.
consumer451 · 18d ago
There is no need to get left/right political here. There are two political parties in the USA, and they both hit the feedback loop of $crack. One might have led to low-trust faster than the other, but they are both $crack addicts in the end.
Just to be clear as to what this means in politics on the ground... left or right, if you have a political position which disagrees with the biggest money, they will primary you. So, left or right, generally speaking, you only see politicians finally standing up for their morals when they are no longer up for election. The most obvious recent example of this is Mitch McConnell.
EasyMark · 17d ago
at some point you hit saturation on most anything, doesn't stop the fact that hundreds of millions were spent on both sides. Kamala lost because she was a female of color, not because of policies, no one will ever convince me otherwise. There are just too many misogynists and racists in the USA currently to have both of those working against you unless you're bordering on messianic in charisma
yardie · 18d ago
You mean a single day fundraiser beat Trump’s single day fundraising by 2-3x, that would be correct. If you think her 90 day campaign fundraising managed to beat Trump’s 8 year fundraising campaign that would be wildly incorrect.
eru · 19d ago
It depends on what you mean by 'strong regulations'. Regulations that are on the books should be enforced as written. In that sense I agree. But it doesn't mean that we actually necessarily need all the regulations that are on the books to stay on the books.
Eg, it would be perfectly fine to make insider trading legal by law. (And in fact, the definition of insider trading in the US differs a lot from the one used in France. So there are lots of things that have long been legal in the US that would have been illegal in France, without the economy collapsing.)
I agree that random enforcement of some regulations but not others depending on the whim of the executive is less than ideal.
pineaux · 19d ago
You could make insider trading legal by law, but that would destroy a lot of the stock market because all non-insiders would basically set themselves up to be ripped off.
Summary: people are already allowed to trade on inside information (in the US), if the person who officially owns the information is ok with that. The prohibition on insider trading in the US is about fiduciary duty to the owner of the information, not about protecting the general public.
No comments yet
Epa095 · 18d ago
> So there are lots of things that have long been legal in the US that would have been illegal in France, without the economy collapsing.
Who knows, maybe we are in the middle of the resulting collapse now ;-)
eru · 18d ago
Well, that collapse is because of tariffs, not the intricacies of differences in insider trading law.
Epa095 · 18d ago
I was thinking more that these kind of lax laws allowed the rich to get richer, and influence politics in ways which enabled or accelerated the fall. But it it a complicated picture of course, and the further back in the chain of causality we go the harder it it to say anything for real.
eru · 15d ago
> [...] allowed the rich to get richer, and influence politics [...]
That would have been a better world than the one we live in.
I'd rather have Romney and Bloomberg etc than the populists we got.
delusional · 19d ago
> It'll get a lot worse before it gets better.
Importantly, there's no guarantee it's actually going to get better. We like to pretend that human existence has some trajectory towards "justice" or "prosperity". I don't think that impulse does us justice.
Stalin/Lenin could have won. Hitler could have won, Napoleon could have conquered and held. It could just get worse.
johanvts · 19d ago
Oppression and corruption is expensive. Systems based on them are not going to be competitive in the long run.
dachris · 19d ago
That may be the very long run. Taking it strictly, Russia never had real democracy. And they are trying hard to export that model.
autobodie · 18d ago
Define "real democracy"
Draiken · 18d ago
Like the American one where unelected billionaires control the government and the populace.
I always find it so surprising how people really do believe individuals have any real power despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
It's a capitalist society so capital is power. Doesn't get simpler than that. Voting is the circus to distract us so we don't realize how much we're being exploited, while giving a sense of agency that simply does not exist.
We can choose but they pick the choices we have.
autobodie · 18d ago
> It's a capitalist society so capital is power.
Precisely.
yardie · 18d ago
I look at apartheid and how long it managed to hang on. And I can only determine it was surprisingly lucrative and competitive as well. It took a long, series of activists and a long time to finally delegitimize and finally break it.
And now, apparently, everyone involved with it had always been against it.
atombender · 18d ago
Systems based on oppression and corruption can still be extremely resilient. Countries like Russia, North Korea, China, Belarus, Cambodia, Eritrea, and Venezuela have all lasted many decades.
closewith · 18d ago
That's a very optimistic belief, not any kind of axiom, but even if we accept it, the long run could easily extend past the lifetimes of every loving person today. It could last generations or much longer.
Epa095 · 18d ago
Maybe oppression is where AI finally shines, making oppressive systems competitive. Technology is certainly helping China, and I can only imagine how much Stasi would love to automatically transcribe and store everything all their microphones caught.
autobodie · 18d ago
Lenin did win.
astral_drama · 19d ago
> It'll get a lot worse before it gets better.
If they're getting away with it, they'll do it again. The tariffs were paused for 90 days. The plan is to run the same playbook in 90 days.
labster · 19d ago
Why do you trust that they will actually wait 90 days to run the same playbook? There’s nothing stopping Trump from reneging on his 90 day tariff pause.
Almondsetat · 18d ago
Capitalism actually thrives where there is only 1 regulation: total transparency. After all, if we go by the classic definition of free market competition we have customers who have perfect knowledge of every product and the products are very similar and etc. etc.
Who cares if someone at the WH does insider trading? In a transparent system people would be able to trace back every transaction and realize something is brewing and they could act accordingly.
wesselbindt · 18d ago
> could act accordingly
Concretely, what are you thinking of here?
Almondsetat · 18d ago
Simply copy their positions. But if everyone's position were available, insider trading wouldn't even exist because it would give the game away
notahacker · 18d ago
By the time you copy their positions, they've made their money.
In theory of course, them being blatantly and obviously corrupt would hurt them at the ballot box. In practice, this is not really something at moves the needle in American politics.
EasyMark · 17d ago
why do you think you would know their positions in time to do anything about it?
Almondsetat · 16d ago
I will leave it to big investors with supercomputers connected directly to the exchanges to eat away at the potential profits of even the slightest insider trading activity automatically
formerly_proven · 18d ago
This is poor bait, even for 2025 HN standards.
EasyMark · 17d ago
who cares? I care, I want insider traders to go to prison for multiple years. That's not a free market, that's a market of those who know things to manipulated the rest of the market into never ending pump and dump schemes.
maxbond · 19d ago
Is this really SEC's bailiwick? Aren't options commodities (and so regulated by CFTC)?
dragonwriter · 18d ago
No, options are derivatives and are, in the US, generally regulated by the body regulating the underlying asset; stock/index options are regulated by the SEC, commodities options by the CFTC.
shawabawa3 · 19d ago
Options are not commodities
They're a derivative, so options of equities are equities and I guess options of commodities are commodities
manuelfcreis · 19d ago
Neither! Options are derivatives, which are also regulated by the CFTC
richardw · 19d ago
You keep the receipts for about 4 years and you speak up one minute after the government changes. You get it done long before the following election.
eru · 19d ago
With a bit of luck, you only have to wait for 2 years, when Congress changes hands.
mattkevan · 19d ago
Bold to assume there are going to be elections.
All it needs is some kind of emergency, genuine, imaginary or self-inflicted, and ‘Oh no, we can’t possibly hold elections until our time of national crisis is over.’
eru · 18d ago
> Bold to assume there are going to be elections.
I'm happy to bet. What odds to do you offer?
netsharc · 18d ago
Probably much easier to rig the elections, just like dozens of "we're democratic!" dictators have done. Erdogan, Putin, Mugabe, Suharto...
yread · 18d ago
You mean like requiring ppl to have a proof of citizenship disenfranchising 21 million
I thought you're agreeing with me about disenfranchisement and how it's evil, but I can see you can also infer that "Did you know 21 million undocumenteds voted?"...
As your article discusses, requiring that proof means paperwork, paperwork some people might not have (e.g. wives who changed their names).
For example in the UK, the Windrush scandal 1) deported British subjects because the government made irrational demands for documents to prove that they're citizens.
they're already trying to jail the guy who kept 2020 election safe. It's a bad sign lol.
immibis · 18d ago
Congress already ruled that time isn't passing, allowing a temporary state of national emergency to become permanent. There's no reason to think they won't find some asinine excuse to deny elections or defer them indefinitely.
They might not even need an excuse. They could just not hold elections and say "what are you going to do about it?"
koolba · 18d ago
You mean like Ukraine?
multjoy · 18d ago
They’re literally fighting for their lives. Nobody wants elections in wartime, not least because polling stations become targets.
You need to lay off the MAGA talking points.
eru · 18d ago
> Nobody wants elections in wartime, not least because polling stations become targets.
Nobody is a strong word. Lots of people want elections, especially in wartime. And lots of other people don't want elections.
But it doesn't matter: the constitution of Ukraine doesn't allow elections during wartime.
I think by default constitutional rules should be followed, unless there are very good reasons not to.
EasyMark · 17d ago
Also if the Ukrainians hated it so much they would just side with Russia and form rebel militias all over and apparently that is not happening, I think they know which side has their best interests at heart and which is trying to genocide them.
eru · 15d ago
Well, from 2014 onward there were supposedly rebel militia groups in the south and east. (Most people think they were Russian puppets however.)
> [...] I think they know which side has their best interests at heart and which is trying to genocide them.
Doesn't even need to be their best interest, really. The Ukrainian government had and has its fair share of flaws. (They exist in the real world after all.) But it's enough that they are a lot better than Russia.
thatcat · 18d ago
The conscripted might disagree and desire a leader who will pursue a peaceful solution, this conclusion is supported by the high number of deserters.
mikeyouse · 18d ago
Public opinion shows there’s nobody more supportive than the continued military defense of Ukraine than the Ukrainians. Even the conscripted would prefer more modern weapons to permanently ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia.
multjoy · 18d ago
Peaceful solution to an invasion? How does that work, exactly?
eru · 18d ago
Well, the invader is the last party to want a war: they'd be happy to just take over.
Russia's takeover of Crimea in 2014 was almost as 'peaceful' as the German takeover of the Sudetenland in the 1930s.
All in all, my comment is just a convoluted way that sometimes the price to pay for peace is too high.
In addition, there's also pre-commitments that make everything more complicated: as a potential victim of invasion, you might want to pre-commit to defending long beyond any reasonable threshold, in the hopes that this will deter invasion. Sometimes your bluff gets called, and then you need to actually fight to maintain your credibility.
Compare mutual assured destruction in nuclear war: nuking Moscow in retaliation for the Soviets nuking New York isn't going to bring anyone back from the dead. But it's what you pre-commit to in order to deter the bombing of New York in the first place.
rat87 · 18d ago
Zelensky was elected in part on a platform of trying to negotiate with Russia but it fell apart because Russia wasn't interested in negotiating and instead decided it wanted to massively expand the war. If Russia shown the smallest sign that they had given up on conquering Ukraine and were willing to seek peace Zelensky would be interested. Zelensky is also more popular then most potential political opponents and they would rather the election would be held after the war when they'd have more of a chance(wartime popularity doesn't always transfer over to peacetime, Winston Churchill lost his post war election). And any credible challenges would likely be more hawkish on Russia not less
sorcerer-mar · 18d ago
Very possible, but you should provide data. The data we have suggests that Zelensky's approval is extremely high among the public and the consensus not to violate the constitution to hold elections during wartime is unanimous within the government.
eru · 18d ago
I guess unanimous is too high a bar amongst any larger group of people.
But I can very well believe that the consensus is virtually unanimous.
sorcerer-mar · 17d ago
The parliament held a vote and it was unanimous. You’re right that parliament isn’t “the government” writ large though.
eru · 15d ago
Thanks for that detail!
Ray20 · 18d ago
>Nobody wants elections in wartime
THE GOVERNMENT doesn't want elections in wartime. Most people want.
>not least because polling stations become targets.
I think this is pure gaslighting. If we are talking about Ukraine, Putin is one of the main supporters of holding elections there. And almost certainly not because he wants to bomb some polling stations, but because he is confident that people will vote for a candidate who will de-facto offer to surrender, and not for Zelensky with his busifications.
multjoy · 18d ago
>Putin is one of the main supporters of holding elections there
Because he will interfere, like he has across Europe. He is a tyrant and has only his own interests at heart.
mopsi · 18d ago
The only likely candidate close to Zelenskyy in popularity is Zaluzhnyi, the former commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. That's not a person who sees surrender as an option.
All major political factions oppose holding elections now, because they expect Zelenskyy's popularity to fade after the war ends and believe their candidates will have better chances then.
eru · 18d ago
> All major political factions oppose holding elections now, because they expect Zelenskyy's popularity to fade after the war ends and believe their candidates will have better chances then.
Well, that, and also the constitution doesn't allow election during wartime.
sorcerer-mar · 18d ago
Ah yes and Putin is sooo above bombing locations that are likely to vote more heavily Zelensky.
Totally outrageous concern.
sorcerer-mar · 18d ago
It is unconstitutional to hold elections during wartime in Ukraine.
sethammons · 18d ago
> Asked whether he’d trade his office for peace, Zelensky told a journalist, “I can trade it for NATO.”
Zelensky is not seizing power. Elections suspended during active, home-turf wartime is normal.
mikeyouse · 18d ago
Especially when Russia is currently occupying huge swaths of territory that would make holding elections there impossible.
labster · 19d ago
And with a lot more luck, the election results will be recognized as legitimate.
readthenotes1 · 19d ago
Assuming the President doesn't pardon you for all crimes committed from 2008 until 2030...
adolph · 19d ago
Could a president pardon everyone for all time?
Or maybe just all future times: the Court has indicated that the power may be exercised at any time after [an offense’s] commission,8 reflecting that the President may not preemptively immunize future criminal conduct.
the president can't pardon you for crimes in the future. Any lawyer would get laughed out of court and possibly charged with murder of the judge who first heard it because he laughed so hard his heart stopped.
more_corn · 18d ago
Are you suggesting that the SEC won’t investigate this obvious insider trading because it came from someone in his inner circle? Big if true.
testing22321 · 18d ago
That same day after market close Trump directly told us it was insider trading AND who dun it.
He literally bragged that his friend made 2.5 billion and the other 900 million that day.
You are inferring too much from that comment. I think those people just had large stock holdings in general and were he market went up a lot that day.
testing22321 · 18d ago
The market briefly went up 7% that day.
To make 2.5 billion just from holdings they must have had stock holdings of 35 billion. Then the next day they lost a lot more than that. I doubt it very, very much.
dist-epoch · 18d ago
There is a difference between making 2.5 billion because you owned stocks and the market went up and making 2.5 billion because you bought just before the market went up and then you sold.
throwaway3b03 · 18d ago
It's unlikely you can make 2.5 billion with a single unleveraged trade. The market went up by what, 6-7% that day? Nobody bets his whole net worth on this to make a profit like that. So I think leverage was definitely involved, which just shows that insider info was definitely there.
cft · 19d ago
from the house of representatives or the white house? and how do you know?
jwilber · 19d ago
Maybe it's a friend of Trump. Maybe it's a friend of Pelosi. Might even be a member of Congress!
"Rules for thee not for me."
paulgb · 19d ago
Is congress actually apprised of the tariff developments, or do they learn about them from twitter like the rest of us?
dashundchen · 18d ago
The horrid congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene happened to disclose many trades that were clearly front running the tarrif announcements. There is definitely an insiders club communicating these things in advance.
I don't think you can say "definitely" but you can definitely say "high possibility of", the president has signaled that the DOJ is okay with white collar crime by his friends and family by firing lots of long term bureaucrats and lawyers known for fighting said white collar crime. He wants to clean house of honest people and put in only sycophants and fellow grifters.
dtquad · 19d ago
How would a "friend of Pelosi" know when Trump would post his "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!" and "90 days pause" posts?
gruez · 18d ago
That's arguably the opposite of insider trading though? I'm now sure how doing insider trading but in secret is somehow better.
jwilber · 18d ago
The implication is they're all in the same club. And if you know any family members of members of Congress, you know this to be true!
ctippett · 19d ago
404 Media reported a story on Monday[1] about a news outlet that claimed there'd be a 90-day break on tariffs for all countries besides China. This was published a few days before the official announcement.
So someone, somewhere, knew something before everyone else.
Good cover: publicly release a rumor via a random tiny outlet (along with a flurry of other rumors). Then if questioned, just say you heard it there.
tirant · 18d ago
Benzinga is not a tiny outlet at all. There’s quite some trading platforms that distribute their news to their customers, like Interactive Brokers.
tradethedelta · 18d ago
Benzinga has probably 40 writers or so. And they do syndicate out to other platforms. They also sell their real-time web traffic and ticker attribution data to hedge funds who will trade on the info.
Quarrel · 19d ago
These sort of trades happy fairly regularly, before market breaking news in individual stock names.
Just search for SEC insider trading cases. When they happen in options they are often pretty obvious unless the market is moving with real momentum the same way, and even then, option sellers will report you if they think it is suspicious. (By obvious, I mean, regulators should start asking questions - of course there can be a multitude of reasons.)
The difference here is that absolutely NO ONE on any side of politics seems to think the SEC & DOJ will pursue these.
w10-1 · 19d ago
> These sort of trades happy fairly regularly
I think the post established that this volume or size of spike is unique before any market-shifting news event coming out of the government in recent decades. The "sort" of transaction is irrelevant except that it's risky and thus relatively low volume normally.
dist-epoch · 18d ago
> I think the post established that this volume or size of spike is unique
It did not established that. If it was so unique, the market would have reacted to this trade (before the news).
Quarrel · 18d ago
It's unusual for it to happen in major indices.
I said it happens in individual stock cases, but very few people / places that control major market moving news leak - and when they do they investigate the hell out of it.
Imagine if this happened 20 minutes before Jerome Powell unexpectedly dropped interest rates?
misja111 · 18d ago
> And it wasn’t just options. At exactly 1:01 pm EST, trading volume in SPY shares themselves spiked. Nearly 2.75 million shares were bought in that single minute.
This is standard practice, it was simply the marketmaker hedging its position after just having sold those $2.5 million call options.
The math checks out; at 85 cent per piece, those were 2.94 million call options. At 9 above the spot the delta was less than one so I guess you'd need to buy slightly above 2 million shares to hedge your delta. The normal SPY trades would have made up for the remainder of the 2.75 million volume.
Shocka1 · 15d ago
Yeah this whole article is meant to stir outrage - HN is taking the bait, but that's expected. The most proficient people in the world at logic, and they are still culpable to biases. My comment shouldn't be confused though - there is smoke, but none of this is really proof because there isn't enough evidence yet from our perspective.
A lot more details needed:
- Is it a fund or individual?
- Does the trader make these kind of trades regularly?
I have more questions, but those are the first questions I would start with. I trade 0 and 1 days quite a bit in SPY and have collected a lot of data and performed statistical analysis on them for several years now. I myself sold S&P futures options that morning based off my data.
My theory until proven otherwise - Trader makes smaller trades in 0 days regularly - market volatility and the state of that week gave a much higher probability that there would be an extreme reversal at the first sign of any hint of good news, which was proven by fake news of a tariff lift just a day or two before. The overall bearish sentiment also coiled the market for an extreme move to the upside. Adding even more probability, the market that day was at the same level from Monday, where it showed buyers were foaming at the mouth to buy. Trump tweets just after market open that it was a great time to buy. Probability increases even more...
Similar to a very high probability count in Blackjack, trader puts in a trade at 12 and has an exit plan for 1 or two hours later. Trader determines that worst case 50 to 75% of the trade is lost due to theta decay by 2pm. Maybe they have a stop at 40%? Best case 2 to 10x's their money due to support levels giving a small rally. They've done this before and the wins outweigh the losses. Maybe even a hedge fund or algo trader running an ML model.
In my data I've seen extremely large multi-million dollar call option plays regularly when there is market volatility like this. Until proven otherwise, everyone just needs to stop with the outrage. I'm completely willing to change my mind as more evidence comes out.
sorokod · 19d ago
kleptocracy
/klĕp-tŏk′rə-sē/
noun
A government characterized by rampant greed and corruption.
testing22321 · 18d ago
A few years back the US labeled China a “state manipulator” of currency.
Surely it will only take a few more rounds of pump and dumping the entire US economy for basically every country to label the US the same, and move away from US bonds and the US dollar as reserve currency. It just won’t be stable enough with all these antics.
When it happens I just hope trump won’t use it as justification for war.
EasyMark · 17d ago
That seems pretty two faced given their own practices over the years.
bdangubic · 18d ago
didn’t you get the memo, Trump is the President of Peace. people voted for him because of this :)))
sorokod · 18d ago
Two carrier strike groups deployed in the area and B2 bombers moved to Diego Garcia.
We will see.
mentalgear · 19d ago
The follow-up post shows the whole magnitude of the insider trading:
> My previous post highlighted a striking example: how a single $2.5 million options position turned into $70 million in under an hour. But focusing solely on that trade risks missing the larger picture. What we actually saw was widespread activity. Numerous sophisticated traders carefully placing positions across several strike prices ($504, $505, $507, $509) in SPY as well as similar trades in QQQ.
> The pattern wasn't limited to a single trade or strike price. It was a coordinated wave of positions, all established within a critical half-hour window before the news broke.
> Imagine someone purchasing thousands of lottery tickets with a specific number combination just moments before those exact numbers are drawn.
Is it any different, in principle, to what congressmen (and women) have been doing for decades? Insider trading, corruption, etc. has all been normalized.
barbazoo · 18d ago
You’re assuming they’ll even hear about it, lol.
bregma · 18d ago
> How can the average MAGA voter which waves a little flag at a rally feel ok with this?
Apparently most of them are just temporarily embarrassed billionaires.
ojbyrne · 19d ago
I imagine this is going to happen again (except 100x) when there’s a China “deal.”
No comments yet
alexey-salmin · 19d ago
I expected an article about AWS configuration mistake.
TheAlchemist · 18d ago
What's missing as information here, is how often this kind of big bets happen. It's only showing some anecdotical data on 2 days from 2008 and 2009.
I believe he's right, but would just like some more proof that it's really extraordinarily rare to place such a big bets, especially on 0DTEs (which I believe did not exist in 2008).
jmyeet · 19d ago
What's surprising about all this is how quickly, easily and cheaply the republic was dismantled and how little opposition there was from people in power.
This culminated in Trump v. United States [1] where unelected partisans simply invented presidential immunity completely out of thin air. That means there are absolutely no possible legal repercussions for any of this. None. And even if there were, the agencies in charge of enforcing it have either been gutted or they've been subverted by putting a sycophantic lackey in charge.
This is the new kleptocracy we live in. Nobody is coming to save us. The supposed political opposition (ie the Democratic Party) is nothing more than feckless controlled opposition who are more interested in defending US imperialism than they are in winning elections.
These are just the most shameless and/or retarded people. Insiders who bought quietly spread over the day before we'll never find out about
m2f2 · 19d ago
As a foreigner I cannot comment on this, else I will be rejected at the airport by the ICE.
That's called freedom my friends.
anonfordays · 18d ago
If this is in reference to the French scientist that was denied entry, that was fake news:
"The French researcher in question was in possession of confidential information on his electronic device from Los Alamos National Laboratory— in violation of a non-disclosure agreement—something he admitted to taking without permission and attempted to conceal.
Any claim that his removal was based on political beliefs is blatantly false."
That said you better make sure your "papers" are good. Instead of just putting you on the plane and sending you back home, there have been many recent cases of tourists handcuffed and sent to ICE facilities for a couple of days up to a couple of weeks. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/04/12/ice-to...
There's an huge amount of entitlement from people coming to the US, as if their presence is a gift and they're owed entry uncontested. For decades at this rate everyone just walked all over US customs and immigration. Now that the US is enforcing immigration laws to similar levels as South Korea, Japan, Israel, Switzerland, Vietnam, etc. people are clutching their pearls. Sorry, refils are no longer free. You're not owed free refils because that's how it use to be.
atoav · 18d ago
Rejected is somewhat euphemistic, you might be:
- held for an indefinite time without due process and information what you did wrong
- stripped naked and spilled with cold water
- potentially worse, but that depends entirely on the way things are developing on a day-by-day basis
And if someone thinks that won't happen to them because they come from a western country and have a low eumelanin pigmentation level, recent examples show that this does not matter¹. Remember ICE also appears to want to police "illegal ideas" at the border now².
These arbitrary arrests, a disregard for the Rule of Law and the valuation of loyalty to the cause over predictable consequences fit the despotic style that is encouraged in the US from the top down lately. The world would be wise not continue betting all their cards on a crazy horse.
These should be very few cases in contrast to the number of people traveling into the US.
atoav · 17d ago
Yeah, but there is a dark number of cases that don't make it to the media, e.g. I just read by a guy who had a 15k$ cruise ship trip booked from the US and was rejected at the border because they found his flight stop "unusual" he came from Australia and had a stopover in Asia because that was the cheapest flight. He wasn't imprisoned without any legal process, but the number of people rejected without cause ought to be much higher than the number of people who will be detained.
I grew up in a tourism country and the number one rule of tourism is that if you want people to come hospitality goes a long way. A mad-king-leader calling them freeloaders and quoting Napoleon with "He who saves his country, violates no law" and a cult like followership doesn't exactly instill confidence that your rights will be respected when you go there.
The current administration seems to be downright hostile to everybody who isn't a US citizen even if we'd just come to spend our money in the US. Pair that with a lack of basic oversight over your cops/TSA-agents/whatever and suddenly the US just isn't as attractive any more.
Don't get me wrong, I find the US fascinating, but given I am in the middle of Europe, I have many destinations with a friendlier atmosphere and a more reliable political leadership to chose from.
refurb · 19d ago
I'd be more interested to see the other side of this trade and how many options were purchase that didn't pay out.
People buy options all the time, sometimes without any insider information, people buy options that happen to just perfectly line up with major market moving events.
Look at 9/11, there were several trades made right before the planes hit that paid out big time. The SEC investigated and found no evidence of insider information.
Who lost money during this deal? Or generally who indirectly paid these lucky gamblers?
mikelitoris · 19d ago
Everyone else, indirectly. So other investors who weren’t in on it, pension funds, John Doe in his retirement home.
procaryote · 19d ago
The people holding the ETF and selling the option. If they had not sold the option, they would have benefited from the value rising, now they instead got (collectively) $2.5M.
If the price had stayed flat or dropped, they would of course still have the $2.5M.
The precision makes it look a lot like a crime, as trading on information that's not publicly available is illegal.
koolba · 18d ago
Note that you don’t need to own the underlying equity to write an option contract. You only own the stock as a hedge.
Owning the stock is a specific lower risk strategy called a covered call.
michaelsshaw · 18d ago
This option was OTM so they also (presumably) profited from selling. Just a capped profit
quickthrowman · 18d ago
The market makers who were short the call options or other market participants who sold calls. Mostly the latter, MMs are pretty good about hedging their positions but I’m sure some were caught offsides.
tirant · 18d ago
Who lost money? It’s difficult to say, because the purchase of those calls did not really tipped the market in any direction, but just provided liquidity for the sale of those call options.
Whoever shorted those calls made some money in the contracts, but they were going to lose money anyway the moment of the announcement.
roflyear · 18d ago
Long term this also really hurts the faith in the market, so it's going to hurt a lot of people who have exposure to anything on US exchanges.
naught0 · 19d ago
The poors. It's always the poors
qwertox · 18d ago
This information just feeds my depression.
svg7 · 19d ago
While I have no doubt that insider trading happens quite regularly, I would not jump to that conclusion here. IIRC the previous day, big Wall street names were advocating for a pause in tariffs . So a lot of people placed bets accordingly. Also staking 2.5M is "small change" for true insiders.
w10-1 · 19d ago
> So a lot of people placed bets accordingly
But why not earlier in the day? Why this unique volume spike then? The one $2.5M is just a sample trade, part of a historic spike.
No one's jumping to conclusions, but it should trigger an investigation.
lucaspm98 · 18d ago
Everyone is jumping to conclusions. The majority of comments on this thread are assuming this is at least someone with inside knowledge, and several are saying Trump or his administration are directly involved.
koolba · 18d ago
Has it even been confirmed that all the trades are the same entity? Or is it the usual momentum play?
az226 · 18d ago
But these rumors were said and talked about several days. But no big options trade was made before the actual day of announcement. That’s why it’s telling.
eru · 19d ago
> Also staking 2.5M is "small change" for true insiders.
Why? A secretary or janitor or a intern could also be an insider. Or are they No True Scotsmen?
Sorry, I was just replying to the general point. I am sure there's lots more details for this particular case.
svg7 · 19d ago
Yes, in theory, anyone can be an insider. But folks up in the chain are much more likely to be "insiders with information". I should have probably said "very rich insiders" instead of "true insiders."
DeathArrow · 19d ago
>Why? A secretary or janitor or a intern could also be an insider. Or are they No True Scotsmen?
I thought the article itself and comments here presume bad faith on behalf of the highest ranking officials.
eru · 18d ago
Yes, sorry, I was only replying to the general point.
About the specifics we have here:
It's sad that the highest ranking officials are willing to corrupt themselves over a few million here or there. (And that's already pretty high by corruption standards. Usually you here of even much lower bribes etc being enough.)
To be pithy: I'm not angry that you can buy officials and politicians. I'm angry that the price is so low.
TheAlchemist · 18d ago
2.5M on 0 day options is not small change at all, even for somewhat big players.
0 day - means it's a win big or loose 2.5M on a single day move.
eru · 17d ago
Is it 2.5M notional (that's not necessarily a lot, especially if the options aren't (much) out of the money), or 2.5M premium paid?
TheAlchemist · 15d ago
2.5M premium paid
sorokod · 19d ago
Could a test run by "very rich insiders". To gauge the system's reaction before the next one, possibly a deal with China.
DeathArrow · 19d ago
>Also staking 2.5M is "small change" for true insiders.
Well, if it was insider trading, Trump and his billionaire friends wouldn't invest just 2.5 million. That's a meager sum for the very wealthy.
Maybe they've even done insider trading but in ways that weren't so obvious.
No comments yet
methods21 · 14d ago
How can any trade be made and not know 'who' made the trade? Doesn't every trading account need to be registered/identified in some manner? KYC right? At a minimum the account holder would want to transfer funds to/from account....
I can't even buy sudafed without 3 forms of ID, yet we have 'invisible' traders of millions of dollars?
NKosmatos · 19d ago
Whenever I see similar articles I get reminded that all these are worthless paperless money, exchanging hands and playing a game. Futures, options, securities (and all the rest financial jargon) proves that there is a very big economic game at play in a global scale. No wonder the whole planet owes some trillions (to whom?) :-)
There is no need for scientists to prove we’re living inside a simulation, this whole global turn based strategy financial game, affecting our lives, is the proof that someone is having a laugh at/with us ;-)
urbandw311er · 19d ago
I take a different view. These moments when the mask briefly slips are a chance to remember that we are controlled by a greedy elite and only given the illusion of choice and prosperity.
olelele · 18d ago
The amount of people in the startup world infected by the American Dream-Logic of privatization and Anarcho-capitalism always astounds me.
All I know and have in my life is thanks to public funding. Social Democracy works and is good for business too.
A state with little financial regulation in the end also has less power and control sum total.
Since the southern US basically survives off slave laborers with no paperwork and giving any normal human decency to those people would probably lower the Murican standard of living I have low hopes for change. Here in the EU we screwed ourselves too haha. No one really looks out for the little guy anymore.
tirant · 18d ago
That is actually incorrect. What you call public funding has been before produced by private individuals or private companies. The State barely generates any money itself. And when it does in large amounts by printing new money it’s actually analog to extorting money to everyone else in the society by impoverishing them via inflation.
There is a common believe that humans would never be generous, altruistic without a State forcing them. And that’s actually quite the opposite. Humankind would have never made it if that was the case. You can observe it clearly still in lots of societies populating earth, specially the poorest ones without public services.
It’s actually the unconditional access to public services that has incentivized the individuality of our society nowadays. If I’m already supported by the State why should I make any effort towards my society? In the past without public services, interaction with your local community was a must.
But it’s also a problem as a donor or supporter: how can I support or donate to any cause if the State is already taxing 50% of my wealth and I have barely any money to buy a house?
Ylpertnodi · 18d ago
>Here in the EU we screwed ourselves too haha.
Eu-person: how? (Pleas stay relevant to your whole comment).
tirant · 18d ago
Do you have medical insurance ? Or car insurance? I guess you and I guess you find them useful.
All these worthless paperless money as you call it are precisely also instruments for companies and individuals to gain some economical stability during uncertain times by buying contracts and shifting the risk to someone else that has either more financial means or has worked to have a better view of future conditions.
So as an example, your medical insurer and your car insurer know pretty well the odds of you needing either medical treatment or suffering some type of car accident. And because they also have the financial means to risk being wrong, they offer you an insurance, because in the aggregated number they are usually right in their predictions.
udev4096 · 18d ago
For fuck's sake, stop with the academic POV. Look at it practically, it's all just an overly complex system with no actual merit
nramanand · 19d ago
A relevant aside: surely insider trading is happening all the time? There are so many daily market-shifting events involving so many privy parties that it seems inevitable to happen every few minutes (not defending the actions in the article).
How many physicians have been able to get rich from learning a CEO will be out of commission? In that case, I'm not even sure whether it would be considered insider trading.
How does one even go about accusing someone of insider trading? The illegality sounds pretty unenforceable.
LeafItAlone · 19d ago
>How many physicians have been able to get rich from learning a CEO will be out of commission?
Do you actually have an answer to that? Or are you just throwing out an unanswerable question as some form of “gotcha”?
Now I’m actually curious. There aren’t _that_ many publicly traded companies; only about 4,000 according to Google. A little over 9,000 IPOs since 1980 [0].
The number of companies where the CEO being “out of commission” on such a short timescale would generate “rich” (to me, in this scenario, >$5 million) levels of ROI has to be pretty low up. Probably not even most of the Fortune 100. Then the number of doctors who have that info and are going to act on it is a smaller fraction. Then the three have to match (command that fits + ill CEO + trading physician).
Do you think it’s over 10? 25?
Never in a million years would I have guessed that there have only been 9000 IPOs in the last nearly half-century. Really drives home how many US businesses are privately owned.
globular-toast · 18d ago
It is surprising that it's such a small number, but upon reflection maybe not so surprising. Stock markets were invented to allow massively capital intensive businesses like railways to get off the ground. You can't grow a railway organically by reinvesting profit like a regular business; it needs to be fully built before it can bring in a penny. Naturally there can only be so many of these businesses. In the case of railways they usually become natural monopolies. So being publicly owned was a really great thing.
But most businesses don't need such large capital injections anyway. They can grow organically, and there's very little reason to sell a profitable company. Although it does happen, of course, Google being a prime example, having gone public when already profitable.
rufus_foreman · 18d ago
It looks like they were only looking at the NYSE and Nasdaq. Smaller companies would not qualify to trade on those exchanges, they would trade over-the-counter. There are more OTC stocks than there are that trade on NYSE/Nasdaq.
"The sample is composed of the IPOs of U.S.-based companies with an offer price of at least $5.00 and listed on the NYSE (excluding NYSE American and NYSE MKT issues after the merger in 2008) or Nasdaq (excluding Nasdaq small cap issues before October 2005 and, after Sept. 2005, Nasdaq capital market issues), excluding ADRs, unit offers, SPACs, closed-end funds, REITs, partnerships, banks and S&Ls, and stocks not listed on CRSP (CRSP includes Amex, NYSE, and NASDAQ stocks)"
nramanand · 19d ago
I agree with you that it's possibly unanswerable, which is more or less the point. The broader idea is that there are lots of obscure interactions like that one I made up.
You can switch up the doctor and CEO patient for anything else. Bankers, lenders, family friends, former professors ... An unbounded number of humans that can come into contact with useful info to trade on. What do we think are the magical constraints that prevent them from doing so? Corporate etiquette?
The ROI will obviously be a function of what information is passed. But I think that I'm more interested in understanding how often it happens rather than that any one case is "low ROI". It is interesting to consider whether it's the ROI threshold that should philosophically make/not make something insider trading.
Isn't it literally all included in this umbrella section?
> Friends, business associates, family members, and other "tippees" of such officers, directors, and employees, who traded the securities after receiving such information;
DeathArrow · 19d ago
But not only the physicians know a CEO will be out of commission. And there are many more cases where a CEO will leave a company without being ill.
And there are much more situations that will influence stock prices than a company changing its CEO. Those situations can be both internal and external to a company.
So I think we potentially have thousands or tens of thousands of people who learn information that make them rich if they act quickly. And even that has a multiplying factor since those people have friends and family.
"Hey Bill, wanna make a quick buck? As soon as market opens buy XYZ. You don't know it from me and I didn't call you today."
LeafItAlone · 19d ago
Also, most of the situations you are describing are not insider trading. If Warren Buffett calls his secretary and tells them he needs to go to the hospital because he’s having a heart attack, and they short BH on the way, that _could_ be considered insider trading. If I’m a nurse at that hospital and I’m on break outside and watch Buffett being wheeled in on a gurney and I trade on that, that would generally not be.
LeafItAlone · 19d ago
>But not only the physicians know a CEO will be out of commission.
Ok, but I was responding to a specific claim from the parent comment specifically mentioning physicians.
solardev · 19d ago
In the past, we liked to pretend this was illegal. Now we don't even bother with that.
eru · 19d ago
Insider trading in the US is more about misappropriating information that belong to a party you have fiduciary duties to, not so much about harm to the public.
For example, imagine you are working for Warren Buffet and you learn that he has quietly bought some stocks and next weeks he's going to announce that. Assume that this announcement will reliably make the stock trade up. If you trade on that information, that's insider trading by US laws.
However, now imagine that you are Warren Buffet. You just quietly bought some stock, and you plan to announce that fact next week. If you trade on that information about your intentions, that's not insider trading by US law: you are allowed to trade on your own private intentions and information.
Notice that from the point of view of the anonymous counter party trading with you on the stock exchange, both situations look exactly the same.
That's an illustration that insider trading law in the US is not supposed to protect the public. (At least not originally.) So making insider trading legal in the US wouldn't make the general public any worse off.
Of course, IANAL applies. The above explanation is mostly paraphrased from Matt Levine's Money Stuff.
vanviegen · 19d ago
Insider trading around Warren Buffett seems like a really odd example. More typical would be company employees knowing the quarterly results before they are published. And there, it's easy to see how the law is protecting the public by leveling the playing field.
wahern · 19d ago
Technically the law is protecting the share holders. Legal scholars, regulators, and even judges have continually tried to push the fraud-on-the-market theory of insider trading, but IIRC it's been firmly rejected by SCOTUS multiple times. There are statutes where the fraud-on-the-market principal pertains, but for your typical insider trading case predicated on Securities Exchange Act jurisprudence, it doesn't fly. Courts have said it would sweep far too broadly and significantly expand the scope of criminal liability (e.g. end up in prison for trading on something you overheard at the coffee shop). As insider trading law has been largely constructed by the courts (the statute its rooted in says nothing about "insider trading"), Congress would have to be explicit about a further expansion of criminal liability.
eru · 18d ago
Yes. And there's also no bans on equivalent 'insider trading' for foreign exchange nor commodities. And markets in these work just fine.
Some economists suggest that insider trading is good for public markets, because it disseminates information. (However fiduciary duties would still apply. But they would only allow the company to sue the vice president who told her golf buddy about the upcoming earnings, but could not sue the golf buddy.)
eru · 19d ago
Even in your example the law ain't leveling the playing field: the company is allowed to trade on its quarterly earnings ahead of publishing them.
LeafItAlone · 19d ago
>That's an illustration that insider trading law in the US is not supposed to protect the public.
From [0]:
>Because insider trading undermines investor confidence in the fairness and integrity of the securities markets, the SEC has treated the detection and prosecution of insider trading violations as one of its enforcement priorities.
> Notice that from the point of view of the anonymous counter party trading with you on the stock exchange, both situations look exactly the same. [...] So making insider trading legal in the US wouldn't make the general public any worse off.
Eh? If nothing else, doesn't it magnify the public's risk beyond whatever impact Buffet could have on his own? How can you possibly claim there is no difference?
You might as well say: imagine you secretly give another country nuclear weapons, and assume that that country plans to use them. Now imagine you plan to use them for the same purpose yourself. From the viewpoint of the public, the situation is exactly the same. So nuclear proliferation wouldn't make the general public any worse off.
Or imagine the president picks a random person by lottery every day to run the country while he goes to play golf. The president can take the same actions himself, so from the standpoint of the general public, nobody would be worse off.
eru · 19d ago
> Eh? If nothing else, doesn't it magnify the public's risk beyond whatever impact Buffet could have on his own? How can you possibly claim there is no difference?
Let me be more explicit: Warren Buffett usually doesn't physically execute his own trades. So the only difference between the two scenarios I outlined is that in the second one Warren Buffett tells you (as his employee) to trade. In the first one, you trade without him telling you to do so.
But it's the same person doing the trades in either scenario.
> Or imagine the president picks a random person by lottery every day to run the country while he goes to play golf. The president can take the same actions himself, so from the standpoint of the general public, nobody would be worse off.
If you have clients, now would be a good time for you to become very curious about something called "the principal-agent problem," rather than wait till some prosecutor mentions the phrase before a dock in which you, if permitted a chair, are sitting.
eru · 18d ago
Do you mean the general 'you', or me specifically?
Fiduciary duty is an important concept in any case, yes.
dataflow · 18d ago
You completely missed the point. It had nothing to do with who is executing the trades.
>> If nothing else, doesn't it magnify the public's risk beyond whatever impact Buffet could have on his own?
I am saying that when you let others pull the same trick in addition to Buffet himself, they can now bring their own additional funds to play with -- meaning they can make more trades and cause even more damage than Buffet could inflict on his own. This clearly enlarges the blast radius and allows more harm to the public than Buffet could cause with his own funds. It is ludicrous to close your eyes and suggest the situation is no different, just like it is by suggesting that there's no difference between one country having nukes vs. N of them having them.
Heck, the fact that Warren Buffet is used as the example here instead of some random John Doe makes it clear how intentionally ridiculous the example is: for this to even pass the laugh test and obscure the reality of the situation, you have to pick one of richest people of all time, so that even aggregating a thousand other random strangers' funds together would still miss his purchasing power by multiple orders of magnitude.
Why don't you start with someone poor instead of Buffet, then add Buffet to the equation, then try to claim that bringing the billionaire into the equation makes no difference, rather than the other way around?
eru · 18d ago
> I am saying that when you let others pull the same trick in addition to Buffet himself, they can now bring their own additional funds to play with -- meaning they can make more trades and cause even more damage than Buffet could inflict on his own.
Buffett is not inflicting damage on anyone by trading on his intentions. Neither would anyone else.
Also: the typical 'insider' in insider trading cases has far less budget to bring to bear than the typical principal. Eg Warren Buffett (and Berkshire Hathaway) are richer than Warren Buffett's assistant.
Also: 'insider trading' is perfectly legal for commodities and foreign exchange, and the markets in these work perfectly well.
> Why don't you start with someone poor instead of Buffet, then add Buffet to the equation, then try to claim that bringing the billionaire into the equation makes no difference, rather than the other way around?
I'm very poor compared to Warren Buffett. If Warren Buffett wanted to trade on any information I held, I'm very sure we could work out a deal.
DeathArrow · 19d ago
Well if CEO X and his deputy Y pass me on the street and they are overly excited or overly depressed, and I overhear what they talk and I buy some options, does it mean I break the law?
miohtama · 19d ago
It has been estimated 25% of stock market trading is some sort of insider trading. However 1) it depends where you draw the line what's insider information and what not 2) not all of these trades all profitable.
Due to insider trading rules being problematic, sometimes more headache than benefit, the UK FCA is now allowing new stock market to launch where insider trading is legal.
LurkerAtTheGate · 18d ago
> How does one even go about accusing someone of insider trading? The illegality sounds pretty unenforceable.
Much of it is data analysis. My favorite examples of this are actual hacks - once foothold is established instead of encrypting & ransoming, the attacker just listens to the CEO/CFO. One hacked a law firm that handled some sizable mergers.
Personal tangent: Once had an opportunity to insider trade on a particular huge aerospace company. Playing a squad-based PvE game, matchmade into a team with 3 real-life friends at said company who chatted on in-game voice comms about their day, talking about court cases and senate hearings, and later panicked when they realized I could hear it all. They were nice guys, and I assured them that I wouldn't misuse what I overheard - I don't work in a relevant industry, and my investments do just fine without an illegal edge (plus I know Matt Levine's Laws of Insider Trading #1: Don't).
dboreham · 18d ago
You seem to have discovered the crime of insider trading and conveniently ignored the fact that it's a crime.
nhkcode · 19d ago
Maybe all the insider trading going on is part of why the chances for regular investors to beat the market are so slim.
jopsen · 19d ago
I doubt it.. I suspect that most of us would trade just as poorly if we knew Q results ahead of the announcement :)
Because it maybe up a bit or down a bit, but that's all going to measured relative to assumptions the market has and those assumptions aren't public either.
epaga · 19d ago
This unethical stuff is where Trump actually shows true “brilliance”.
His Truth Social post that day saying (quote) “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!” immediately gave any insider traders a perfect alibi.
AstroBen · 18d ago
why are you assuming it was trumps idea
ndsipa_pomu · 18d ago
Isn't this kind of thing going to destroy "trust" in the markets? Basically, people who don't have access to the advance/inside information will lose money to those that do - similar to betting in a casino where you know the odds are against you.
This could lead to a lot of investment in the U.S. being diverted elsewhere to markets that have some kind of regulation to prevent abuse.
globular-toast · 18d ago
What actually is the point of selling someone an option? Do enough people buy them and lose to make it worthwhile for the seller? Isn't this literally just legalised gambling? Are there enough addicts to make it lucrative like other gambling? Or are these resold packaged up into something that nobody reads à la synthetic CDOs?
dboreham · 18d ago
It's basically gambling+, but the party on the other side of the trade is like a casino. On average they make money (usually).
+There are some non-gambling reasons for stock options trading, akin to commodities options being used to reduce risks in farming.
sunnyba · 18d ago
Saw some more granular charts on this for the different options here as well for those interested:
If I am not mistaken, Trump said earlier that it's a great time to buy. Isn't there a chance that someone acted on that, seeing it as a hint?
ZeroTalent · 18d ago
Not with 0DTE options at this scale at multiple strikes. highly improbable. This wasn't the only trade. It was a sweep of hidden trades across different strikes on SPY and QQQ. Occam's Razor says this is insider trading. This has never happened before to this degree. The cool thing is that all of the historical data is transparent and cannot be removed from the ledger, and we can ask and know who made the trades it will just take a few weeks.
And looking at the options flow, it was billions across all the unusual 0DTE trades.
jaza · 19d ago
Surely the number one suspect for having made this trade, is Trump himself (and/or his immediately family)? Nobody knew better exactly what would be announced and when, than the guy who did the announcing. Ownership could be hidden behind trust / shell structures, possibly indefinitely, or at least until it's too late for anyone to do anything about it (although in Trump's America, I doubt that anyone could do anything about it anyway). We already know that he's unscrupulous and unprincipled. We already know that he's an indicted felon.
freen · 18d ago
This is my surprised face.
Elect a felon, you get felonies.
nanreh · 18d ago
You mean “official actions”.
freen · 18d ago
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.
Ylpertnodi · 18d ago
Well, someone voted for him.
freen · 17d ago
PT Barnum was a rich man.
uptownfunk · 19d ago
I mean in theory couldn’t anyone close to the news source transmit it somehow via an anonymous communication channel to someone else so they can make the trade. Even if there is an investigation they have to find the proof to make a conviction right?
dboreham · 18d ago
That's how prosecution of insider trading crime is done.
FilosofumRex · 13d ago
As the old saying goes, there's an important distinction when it comes to appointments to oversee the Wall Street - DemocRATS appoint corrupt rats, while Republicans appoint imbeciles!
Therefore the outcome is always the same.
huijzer · 19d ago
Overall the argument by the author is very convincing and well put. One part I don’t fully agree with is
> If the trades hadn’t worked out, the losses would have been swift and total. Zero-day options don’t forgive bad timing. The entire $2.5 million could have evaporated by the close of trading. Even with SPY shares, any unexpected reversal would have meant millions in losses.
This has exactly been Taleb’s strategy. Buy option where the writeoff is small when wrong and the payoff huge when correct. As described in the post, the ratio was 1 to 25. Also it was likely that the market would go through huge shifts because the policy is so unpredictable.
So it is not impossible that someone figured that it would be possible to just buy these calls for the whole month. As long as one was a hit, the trade would not make a loss. And given the volatility, at least one would be a hit in this month. These short option bets are truly not such strange ehm options in these volatile times.
So I would like some data about whether similar options were bought on other days in similar volumes.
Having said that, I do find the evidence very strong and it’s reasonable to assume that this was insider trading. I personally suspect someone at JPM or Ackman. They said they “convinced” Trump so maybe Trump said in a meeting that it would probably happen and they immediately bought the calls.
dwedge · 19d ago
Unless I'm totally misreading this, it wasn't a 2.5m trade, it was 80c per option at 30,000 of them, less than $30k
The option to buy at 2.5m was not an obligation to do so
MichaelRo · 19d ago
Yes you are misreading because options have a contract size of 100. So you can't buy "one option", only a contract of 100 options at minimum. Which means 80 cents x 100 = 80 bucks per contract. Multiply by 30,000 and you get =~ $2.5 million.
And it's bullshit that you can reliably make money of such low probability options. Even if you do, you never put $2.5 million on something with a huge probability of ending in a complete loss, these deep out of the money options are essentially lottery tickets.
I do buy slightly OTM options and it's barely profitable and even so I think mostly out of pure luck. No way would someone have done this trade without inside info.
dwedge · 18d ago
Thanks for explaining
huijzer · 19d ago
> And it's bullshit that you can reliably make money of such low probability options. Even if you do, you never put $2.5 million on something with a huge probability of ending in a complete loss, these deep out of the money options are essentially lottery tickets.
Nassim Taleb: "I was effectively short volatility. [...] I would have been harmed by small movements. I was set up to be harmed by small movement and gain if the move continues to something very large." [1]
He also described in one of his books that this strategy works because on most days you will lose money, and most people psychologically don't like that. But you have to ignore that and keep betting until you suddenly make a lot of money.
In case you don't know Taleb and would like to point out that he probably is a fraud, please note that his books and articles have been cited 39946 times according to Google Scholar. See also his Wikipedia [2]. Although I am aware that these are all popularity-based metrics, I unfortunately don't have a better metric available. I invite you to read his books for yourself and make your own decision on his credibility.
> I do buy slightly OTM options and it's barely profitable and even so I think mostly out of pure luck. No way would someone have done this trade without inside info.
Okay if the discussion is whether this particular trade was unlikely I can agree, but your "No way" makes no sense to me.
Taleb's point seems more to be that he saw a mispricing and traded on it one day, rather than anything profound regarding option pricing, unless I am missing something. Anyway, it has little to do with what's being said in the article.
huijzer · 18d ago
> Doesn't that mean he was long volatility?
Now that you say it could be that he misspoke indeed.
> Taleb's point seems more to be that he saw a mispricing and traded on it one day
Okay so Taleb was literally an "option trader" as in he traded one option on one day in his life?
> Anyway, it has little to do with what's being said in the article.
How is Taleb, who is an option trader and who has written about options trading for years, not related to an article on an options trade?
nramanand · 18d ago
I guess because the article is talking about insider trading through the use of options and your point on Taleb is how he traded options like any option trader would.
I should be clear that what you seem to think ties these together, i.e:
> given the volatility, at least one would be a hit in this month.
I don't actually believe to be true. It's not like these options aren't being priced somewhat accurately. There could be insanely high volatility and all that needs to happen is for the price to go up instead of down for none of your options to "hit."
svg7 · 19d ago
nicely put, but I wonder why you think that similar volume of options would be bought on other days. These days are much more volatile and bets like these love volatility
ncann · 19d ago
> So I would like some data about whether similar options were bought on other days in similar volumes.
The volumes are there for all to see and the answer is no.
dash2 · 19d ago
Could you do the rest of us a favour who don't know how to look up volumes on spy options, and post a link?
hermannj314 · 18d ago
I think Wall Street would love to know the secret formula that can detect fraud and insider trading by analyzing trade volume in real-time that apparently hundreds of people in this very forum all seem to be aware of.
I'm surprised if they would let the trades go through at all once they know the secret.
cft · 19d ago
"At 1:30 pm, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he was pausing most of the tariffs he had imposed earlier that month. "
he actually posted at 1:18. not that there is nothing to see here, but it would help the credibility if the article was accurate
Fade_Dance · 18d ago
I was reading this event, and unless I'm missing something, all of these reports and theories don't mention the blindingly obvious fact that should be dominating - 1pm was the 10 year bone auction.
Due to many factors (mostly around the crash that was in full swing, and a bond market that was illiquid and melting down), this was a key moment around which a huge amount of position management happened.
I'm not at all saying that there shouldn't be extensive investigation around insider trading around the Trump announcement. There obviously should be. And I'm also not saying that a big block of calls wouldn't fit the bill for that. It would (although it begs the question about the actor being so brazen. There would be countless ways to hide the bet more effectively while still producing insane profit).
What I am saying is that it's ridiculous to me that there's no discussion about the bond auction! First of all you can't just look at a block of option contracts independently many of them are part of wider trade structures. Those call options could have just been hedging short portfolio deltas, or be part of any number of strategies. The timing does signify that you ever executed the trade, ill intentioned or not, was aware of bond auction mechanics.
So you're starting to run into some Occam's razor territory here. Either the participant was sophisticated enough to understand the volume surge around bond auction data releases yet chose to do an incredibly boneheaded bet (instead of some sort of more cloaked relative value trade that would make 10x as well, or just making a bet on something slightly less obvious like credit spreads or ETFs that are trade-war exposed, etc), or the participant was making a clumsy obvious swing for the fences, yet lucked into to the minute perfect timing to cloak the transaction. Meanwhile there is the simplest answer which is just that the position was part of the huge wave of trading around the bond auction results.
I'd welcome the investigation, but it's pretty shocking to me that I'm seeing so much discussion around this without these points being brought up!
I manage a portfolio and also put large blocks of options that benefit from market rallies on at exactly the same time. That's because Bond volatility was sky high, and once the results came in, one of the likely outcomes is a huge volatility crush. That means that if you have positions that you've been holding from executing off during the crisis due to elevated volatility, and have a view that the market is nearing the end of capitulation (all of the indicators that most fear, like liquidations, fear/greed index tanking, positioning being bearish, are huge bullish signals to the trading world), then in order to dodge the binary event risk you may want to re-add exposure at that moment. Readings from prime broker reports show that institutional participants were extremely low in positioning, so the risk that would need to be hedged for many would have been upside risk. If someone wants to hedge their upside risk but doesn't want to actively move out of their bearish/locked down positions during the crisis, they may well use options.
(Devil's advocate argument concluded)
oa335 · 18d ago
I believe some of the action around 1PM was auction related, but the options activity still looks strange.
Why would someone hedge with 0DTE options as opposed to normal options?
I’m no longer in that space, but I’d assume the OOTM strikes are less liquid than normal options, with higher theta as well. That looks like a very expensive hedge.
What kind of position would be hedged with these options that couldn’t be hedged with normal options?
notdarkyet · 18d ago
One of the reasons hedging with ODTE has become common for event based situations is because they are cheaper than those with expiration's later than the event date
oa335 · 18d ago
Cheaper in what sense?
I’d assume the theta would be higher for 0dte? With normal options you could just roll out of them the next day. I guess you would be crossing 2 bid ask spreads, but is that more expensive than the theta decay?
heywoods · 18d ago
Thanks for sharing your expertise on this topic. As someone with limited knowledge in this area, I appreciate your contributions.
I'm curious if you could evaluate an AI response from Perplexity. I asked it to analyze your comment (https://www.perplexity.ai/search/summarize-https-govinfo-lib...) and would value your expert assessment of its accuracy and quality. Perhaps a grade score with brief comments on what stood out?
I feel current AI benchmarks don't capture the data to really gauge how reliable AI tools are for topics requiring some advanced/expert domain knowledge of. Your role is, "expert in the middle" to provide commentary on what it gets right or wrong. Everything sounds right and looks right when I don't know what is what ya know?
notdarkyet · 18d ago
This is the most reasonable comment here on the topic. Everything else so far is either blatantly political and/or misunderstands market dynamics.
Unfortunately half the comments I read on here are becoming increasingly more reddit-esque. Users posting emotionally charged comments and speaking with an authoritative voice on topics they have little experience or knowledge in an accordingly Hacker News has become more and more useless as a news source.
latexr · 18d ago
> Unfortunately half the comments I read on here are becoming increasingly more reddit-esque.
From the guidelines¹:
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a² semi³-noob⁴ illusion⁵, as⁶ old⁷ as⁸ the⁹ hills¹⁰.
So you are going to post this in retaliation and not take a look at how useless this comment is?
latexr · 18d ago
If you think the comment is useless and doesn’t contribute to the conversation, downvote it (and flag it if it is particularly egregious). That’s why those features exist.
But complaining that HN is becoming Reddit is (as demonstrated by the links) a tired, repetitive, and incorrect complaint that creates noise and does not advance the discussion. Which is why the guidelines ask you to not do it.
bjt12345 · 17d ago
Is it possible someone got the Treasury Auction results earlier and made a guess that Trump would pull the Tarrifs and then made this transaction?
w_TF · 18d ago
you don't even need insider information to make this trade (although he still might have tipped people off personally)
and you might have felt especially confident if you recalled him doing the exact same thing in 2018
dboreham · 18d ago
I made a trade (very small one) even though I had no clue about his post at the time. My trade was done on the basis that he was clearly either going to reverse or be removed (and then JD would reverse).
testing22321 · 18d ago
That same day after market close Trump directly told us it was insider trading AND who dun it.
He literally bragged that his friend made 2.5 billion and the other 900 million that day.
Do you have anything that ties together this trade with those investors?
Anyone who held equities that day were up 6-7%, so many billionaires were up that much or more without touching their holdings.
thrance · 18d ago
We just assisted to the largest pump and dump scam in history, a masterclass in wealth extraction by the top 0.1%. This country is headed to a Russian-type oligarchy, becoming a sandbox for mega-billionaires.
wiseowise · 19d ago
Wake me up when orange gets impeached.
PaulRobinson · 19d ago
He's a 2x impeached convicted felon.
He told everyone what he was going to do. A lot of people thought he was a lying politician who lies, and therefore these were all lies. Or, at best, jokes or exaggerations.
And now, 4 months into a 4 year term, he's doing it all. Who knew?
So when he jokes that he can do whatever he wants, including run for a third term, learn from the past: it isn't a joke, even if he's chuckling; it isn't an exaggeration; it's not a lie. It's real, it's the plan. Decide how you feel about it.
I'm not criticising anyone or anything here, I'm just stating facts. It's sad to me that so many people think this is all coming as some sort of huge surprise.
jxjnskkzxxhx · 18d ago
You know who also told everyone what he was going to do? And about whom everyone said "nah he's not really that crazy, he's just pretending for his supporters". Hitler. Also just stating facts.
jxjnskkzxxhx · 19d ago
Wake up, he got impeached twice.
wiseowise · 18d ago
During this term.
solardev · 19d ago
[flagged]
jxjnskkzxxhx · 19d ago
The media is largely at fault here, pretending that both sides are equal.
thih9 · 19d ago
The people are even more at fault, being fine with this.
No comments yet
roflyear · 18d ago
There is some kind of weird issue here, not sure what it is called, that where if the media were to blow this up everyone would say they are overreacting.
So it becomes a "seat at the table is better than no seat" thing where they won't ask Trump these questions.
thrance · 18d ago
It's a standard fear of repercussions, no ones wants to speak up today so it all gets progressively worse and harder to speak up tomorrow.
thih9 · 18d ago
It’s not the only possible outcome. Many countries have successfully protested against less controversial government practices and/or under worse conditions than there are now in the US.
Obama assassinated multiple US citizens without due process of law?
sdfjhdfn · 18d ago
And did an about-face on whistleblowers. He, like his successors, have all been anathema to freedom. Class balkanization.
notdarkyet · 18d ago
[flagged]
lm28469 · 18d ago
Hacker news is made of people usually smart people, and smart people tend to favor one side of the political spectrum more than the other
permalac · 18d ago
Is kind funny when you see who is lost.
I though even the most trumper had seen the light, but is clear their delusion is strong.
refurb · 19d ago
Let's not play that game please.
We don't even know who made these trades.
If we look at actual trades by politicians who actually sit on committees with tradable information, we know the biggest culprits are on both sides of the aisle.
Inside trading rules concern only leaking corporate-private insider information.
LeafItAlone · 19d ago
By Nancy Pelosi, you actually mean her husband.
And if you look at the trades, you’ll learn the biggest secret on Wall Street: make long term bets on tech and you’ll get richer. Don’t tell anyone I told you.
miohtama · 19d ago
Family members are often indicated in insider information tradesm they are still trading on insider information when if they are not part of the decision making process themselves. Both leaker and utiliser are responsible.
In the case of Pelosi, she became so famous about this that there are various Nancy Pelosi stock trackers now.
LeafItAlone · 19d ago
Let’s be real: Pelosi became famous for it because right-leaning groups were looking for yet another thing to put on her and then it was picked up by WSB and became a meme.
Pelosi’s rate of return isn’t the highest (in 2024, it was 10th, less than half the highest).
If you analyze their trades, very few are suspect of timing. They just make a bunch of long term bets on tech.
> If you analyze their trades, very few are suspect of timing. They just make a bunch of long term bets on tech.
But what about the ones that very obviously are? Why did they sell a lot of Visa stocks?
"On Tuesday, less than three months after the massive transaction, Visa was hit with a DOJ lawsuit alleging that the company illegally monopolized the debit card market."
Selling whenever a company gets into regulatory trouble means you avoid all the big downs but still get from all the long term ups. Its a very simple strategy as you say, but its still insider trading even though the ups are mostly the long term gains.
LeafItAlone · 18d ago
>Why did they sell a lot of Visa stocks?
Ok, I guess you got me there. I guess there is no explanation why they sold $500k-$1m Visa on July 01, 2024, almost 3 months before the Sep 24, 2024 DOJ lawsuit. It's not like Visa was in a already in in a slump since the beginning of the 2024, going in the opposite direction of their tech-based stocks [it was]. It's not like they have been slowly shedding Visa for the past decade, every couple of years [they have been]. And they must certainly have closed out their full position in Visa at tht time [they didn't]. In theory it could be possible that they were shedding that to load up on $2m-$10m of NVDA around the same time [like everybody else was]. But that would be too convenient [it's not]. And they certainly made the right choice, Visa currently being ~22% above the point that they sold at; they sure saved a lot of money doing that [they lost out on money].
Rather than taking for gospel what the leader of the opposing party and it's media arms are telling you to believe (especially when many get the value wrong), I strongly urge you to consider the factual data and draw conclusions for yourself.
And then, when you want to basically match Pelosi's trades - go load up on VOO or similar like the rest of us did in 2024.
> But what about the ones that very obviously are? Why did they sell a lot of Visa stocks?
That's a good question and let's use that example.
According to the article and as you mentioned, they sold Visa stock less than 3 months ago and THEN the DOJ filed a lawsuit against the company.
So how did Pelosi know that that would cause the stock to drop and the DOJ was going to file it? The lawsuit wasn't public months ago and it is related to none other than the government which she has access to.
Then she traded with that information with no downside risk which she benefited from.
If that is not an insider trading loophole, I don't know what is.
LeafItAlone · 18d ago
>So how did Pelosi know that that would cause the stock to drop and the DOJ was going to file it? The lawsuit wasn't public months ago and it is related to none other than the government which she has access to.
>Then she traded with that information with no downside risk which she benefited from.
>If that is not an insider trading loophole, I don't know what is.
Yes, if you start with the conclusion (that she traded because of the impending DOJ lawsuit), then, yes, you will reach the conclusion that she insider traded because of the DOJ lawsuit.
If you instead ask why they might have traded Visa at the time they did, you will see that there were many valid reasons that they (and many, many others) decided it was a good time to sell. And as it turns out, they were all wrong, because Visa is up compared to the broad market since their sell date (July 1, 2024).
> If you instead ask why they might have traded Visa at the time they did, you will see that there were many valid reasons that they (and many, many others) decided it was a good time to sell.
All said in hindsight today, but never for those who benefitted from the insider information. Investors will always buy the stock after it plummets, whilst those who didn't sell had to wait or buy lower to break even.
This does not excuse the fact that the Pelosis' benefitted from insider (political) information and traded on that, like this blatant example. An advantage that neither of us have.
Defending politicians trading on insider info (political or economic) isn't the hill one should die on. If you did exactly that and made tens of millions, you would be in prison and be replying to me years later telling others not to do it.
LeafItAlone · 18d ago
>This does not excuse the fact that the Pelosis' benefitted from insider (political) information and traded on that, like this blatant example.
You, nor others, have not actually proven that.
>Defending politicians trading on insider info (political or economic) isn't the hill one should die on.
Right, and that’s not what I’m doing.
I think politicians in top levels of government should be banned from trading their own stocks (and family, etc.). (Though admittedly I don’t know exactly what that looks like) They should be serving the people, not themselves.
But if I tell you sandwiches should be banned because they are bad for you and I bring you a bowl of pasta as an example of their harmful ways, I’m going to look silly, aren’t I?
rvz · 18d ago
> You, nor others, have not actually proven that.
In the Pelosis' circumstance, clearly their repeated actions of such trades and their connection to the timing of key legislation or lawsuits requires no further proof, given their long history of this front-running such that other congressmen and women are doing the same thing believing they can get away with the insider trading loophole.
By inspection, it is quite obvious to see how one can repeatedly front-run legislation ahead of everyone else and outperform the market.
> Right, and that’s not what I’m doing. I think politicians in top levels of government should be banned from trading their own stocks (and family, etc.).
Why not ban them from trading all stocks instead of just their own and why only those just from "top levels" of government?
They are serving the people as well and there shouldn't be exceptions for those that have access to that level of legislation before it is made public and then trade against it no?
LeafItAlone · 18d ago
>In the Pelosis' circumstance, clearly their repeated actions of such trades and their connection to the timing of key legislation or lawsuits requires no further proof, given their long history of this front-running such that other congressmen and women are doing the same thing believing they can get away with the insider trading loophole.
Claiming this happens, no matter how many times you repeat it (without evidence) does not mean it happens.
Clearly, Your repeated denial of fact implies that it is instead _you_ are trading on insider information. The evidence is all right there. You should be locked up.
>it is quite obvious to see how one can repeatedly front-run legislation ahead of everyone else and outperform the market
Yes, by doing exactly what the the Pelosis and many of us did in the same time period: invest heavily in tech.
I have have about double the rate of return since 2020 than the Pelosis. Many of my moves independently mimic theirs. I personally got out of Visa in Spring of 2024, also in favor of NVDA. Am I insider trading?
rvz · 17d ago
> Claiming this happens, no matter how many times you repeat it (without evidence) does not mean it happens.
You already know they did and yet still continue to defend politicians like the Pelosis' trading on insider political AND legislative information before it it released publicly and that privileged access entirely benefits them, not retail investors like yourself.
So, I don't think you even believe in what you just said about supporting a ban on politicians front-running the market. It should be ALL of them and there are zero exceptions.
It's as if you really want politicians to continue front-running the market with the sort of access that they have.
> Clearly, Your repeated denial of fact implies that it is instead _you_ are trading on insider information. The evidence is all right there. You should be locked up.
You got it all mixed up and it is other way round.
I'm not the one here admitting on this site to be "trading" or copying politicians trades to get an "edge" (it really isn't) like the Pelosis' and others (who truly have insider access to decision making legislation) really have on their trades.
The stock can drop / rise before the disclosure and you would always be behind regardless. So this accusatory comment is hilarious and laughable coming from someone like you supporting politicians using such loopholes for years.
The entire point is, if YOU did that yourself, made millions BEFORE the release of key legislation and knew people with connections to congress or the government; YOU would be talking to me on this site from your prison cell telling others to not do it.
LeafItAlone · 17d ago
So far you have made four posts in this thread and provided no evidence. Four opportunities to provide data on what you _feel_. Four chances to share links or reports.
And yet, here you are without of that.
As such, it is doubly clear, as described above, that you are insider trading. I hope that you are prosecuted to the fullest extent.
rvz · 17d ago
> So far you have made four posts in this thread and provided no evidence. Four opportunities to provide data on what you _feel_. Four chances to share links or reports.
You realize that what you just posted was aiding for supporting corrupt insider trading activities in congress such as [0] and [1] in both parties?
Why do you think a bi-partisan total ban on stocks for all politicians never goes forward? [2] [3] Because at least for (some) congress-people they already know that insider trading and front-running on key information can and does indeed happen.
Which is something you would be against given the Pelosis' and others directly benefitting from this loophole, like the Nvidia [1] and Google trades [3] all timed in connection to key decisions from the government.
> As such, it is doubly clear, as described above, (baseless) that you are insider trading (citation needed). I hope that you are prosecuted to the fullest extent. (no case)
Except I didn't copy or trade on anything. You admitted to what you are (baselessly) accusing me of. Also...
It's extremely more likely that you (not any congress-person) as a retail trader would be investigated and prosecuted (and jailed) for insider trading than any other congress-person, if you knew someone with political insider information and traded on that.
But please continue to defend your politicians front-running you with their insider advantage.
Here we have people defending politicians from benefiting from insider information and attempting to split hairs in what is the difference between Pelosi and Trump.
There isn't any.
There is no difference in them knowing something ahead of you and they may have already traded that ahead of the event. (and you copying it very late when the move has already happened).
They benefit, you do not.
vasco · 19d ago
You can worry about market manipulation, or you can buy GME shares, lock them in the Direct Registration System and wait. I just like the stock.
anovikov · 19d ago
I think we should get over the fact that any pretense of obeying the law and morality have now evaporated and everyone trying to stay in those bounds will inevitably lose because not doing so gives such an enormous advantage. People will not just do inside trades, but will actually cause geopolitical scale events simply to do a good trade.
aetherspawn · 19d ago
The stock market needs to just be deleted. It’s the insider trading scam machine of the rich class.
The whole goal of the stock market is to come up with information that people don’t generally have (insider trading) either from research, or secret info, so you can dupe everyone else’s money.
random3 · 19d ago
Delete along with publicly traded companies, or what’s the plan?
aetherspawn · 19d ago
It makes sense to allow public investment in companies, but base it off (regulated) external valuation rather than real time supply/demand.
Have a limit on how frequently a company can get revalued (months).
Do everything possible to make it a long term investment tool and not something that can be easily gamed. This is also less stressful for the individual investor — most people I know who trade stocks also check the stocks 10+ times per day and it occupies such a large area of their headspace.
sethammons · 18d ago
> (regulated) external valuation
Is that not the SEC and Generally Accepted Accounting Principals (GAAP)?
> Have a limit on how frequently a company can get revalued (months).
Is that not quarterly reports and earnings filings?
> Do everything possible to make it a long term investment tool and not something that can be easily gamed
Your suggestion was to delete it. One suggestion I've heard is to increase the transaction price, and marginally increase it with trading volume by the given actor. Micro-transactions become too expensive to be profitable.
miohtama · 19d ago
Socialism. Worked well in the past (:
hello_computer · 19d ago
You can have a market economy without immortal corporations. This is something Quigley pointed out a long time ago. The varieties of persona ficta we have created is unlike anything in history. Even the old British charters were limited in terms of either duration, operations, or both. Modern corporations can do whatever they want for as long as they want. They are mostly insulated from criminal law. An individual poisons the town, he gets the lynch mob. A team of executives poisons the town (after days/weeks of cool deliberation), they get bonuses.
simgt · 18d ago
Most companies are not publicly traded. Getting rid of the stock market doesn't mean that your local coffee shop is now state-owned. And if they sell specialty coffee, it may not even impact the price of the beans.
hello_computer · 19d ago
The brilliant thing is that they have woven it deep into the retirement ponzi-schemes, so nothing short of a cataclysm will unwind it.
There is also the Machiavellian consideration of external threats. We need these corporations to make the tools of Ahriman. Without them, another country's corporations will make them first, and use them to subjugate us. People who believe in God (not just the Abrahamic one, but any good creator) prefer not to play this game, but most people are strict materialists, so they are locked into this equation.
aetherspawn · 19d ago
Sorry I don’t really understand the part about the tools of Ahriman, would you mind to explain?
hello_computer · 19d ago
Technology of all sorts. Engineering, finance, management, etc. I am leaning more on the Steiner interpretation than the strict Zoroastrian one. One could also say "The Devil", but that will really get you people squealing. One could refer to the apocryphal "Book of Enoch" for the details on that one.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK · 18d ago
When they say stock market returns 7% on average, it's >7% for the insiders/manipulators and <7% for the regular Joe.
Actually, “we”, collectively, do know, because the SEC maintains an “XKEYSCORE for equities” called CAT.
If there was interest, the government could know exactly who placed these trades. But the call (options) are coming from inside the house.
https://catnmsplan.com/sites/default/files/2025-04/04.01.25-...
Also, CAT is run by CATNMS, LLC which was created in response to an SEC rule 613, however it is operated by the same consortium of SROs that it purports to provide oversight on...
All these layers of responsibility diffusion and a notable absence of penalties for failing to meet rule 613 guidelines mean that rule is little more than for show.
I'm not a legal expert at all but so far the most useful mental model has been to assume absolutely no one is shielded from executive power (including organizations and people entirely outside the federal government) unless the courts have delivered a final ruling on it.
This is a serious question. What have I missed?
Also, it's not that I think they won't defy courts but they'll be very careful in doing it (well, at least as careful as this administration can be) so it's still a reasonable base assumption that court orders protect you since while it's not the ironclad protection it was it still gives you some protection for now. Though that "for now" is obviously rather ominous.
In the past month the SEC has stopped most enforcement actions involving crypto.
This explains how, written just before Trump assumed power:
While he can't force Gensler to step down as a commissioner at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, he can name a new interim SEC chair as soon as he's inaugurated on Jan. 20. He can also nominate a new commissioner to the Senate, which has to confirm the pick.
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/11/07/heres-how-quickly...
And Gensler resigned as Chair as soon as Jan 20th:
https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025-29
Such an expectation was rational prior to 2025-01-20. Since then it's been completely counterfactual.
In general I think you’re correct because the “inside” information is typically not as broad or powerful. But I don’t think we live in general times. If POTUS gave me personally a heads up about such adjustments on tariffs, after watching indexes tumble after announcing them, and knowing the opposite direction, I would dump almost everything I had access to in such stocks largely effected by reevaluation from tariffs.
Knowing major policy shifts before they happen from one of the powerful governments in the world is useful information, especially when the policies are being set by a handful of people who can limit access to knowledge escaping even more than regularly so markets don’t adjust from larger sets of insider information.
Now is it really considered “insider” trading in this case? Probably not, and this administration can get away with anything it seems.
All depends on if it's in the storm path drawn by the Presidential Sharpie.
[0] First Trump threatened to nuke hurricanes. Now he’s waging war on weather forecasters
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/04/trump-...
We're witnessing the removal of all of the guardrails, traffic signals, road maintenance crews. The highway patrols have been replaced by organized teams of highwaymen.
It'll get a lot worse before it gets better.
What we are witnessing is the devolution of the USA from a high-trust to low-trust business environment. "Low-trust business environment" is the euphemism we have used to describe other countries, where corruption is rampant. This is so sad to watch.
That environment isn't being outcompeted by better, more fair rules - it's just getting vandalized for a few people's gain, and creating risk for everyone else .
Came to nothing.
As far as I understand, the BRICS block does not actually exist. I mean, being member of it does not mean anything serious. There are no obligations, no agreements, no roadmaps. We might as well talk about a alliance of countries whose names begin with the letter "S"
Of course, countries like China are catching up anyway-- they're more than a billion people and very able, and of course, people are working hard to get out of this arrangement. I agree that it will be disruptive, but I think the crash has been in the making for years.
When US interest rates went from 1% to 4.5-5% without a drop in stock prices or a corresponding increasing in dividends I could only interpret that as pure irrationality, and even now companies like Tesla still have P/E ratios of 133.54 whereas excellent firms in the same business-- Volkswagen and Toyota have P/E ratios 3.24 and 6.21 respectively. I'm surprised it still hasn't gone through the floor. The traders by trading at these prices are implicitly assuming interest rates will go back to <1% without any drop in earnings, and that won't happen.
The Dow crashed from ~36k to ~28k in less than a year, and that decrease in value doesn't account for inflation. Adjusting for inflation I don't think the markets have actually fully reached their late 2021 peak.
France and Britain alone used to be able to defend trade routes. I don't think it's a huge expense. It really is good for essentially everyone aside from the US itself, once the disruption is over. Obviously we'll have some kind of crash though, but I think that was inevitable with or without this.
That was a different world. France and Britain today have nowhere the kind of force projection the USA does, via its military bases and aircraft carriers.
The US probably wasn't in preventing an invasion of Egypt, but if not restrained I'm sure that Britain and France could have realised their objectives, and if they had had a continuous need to realise different changing objectives they would have retained more capability.
France and Britain used to be two of the world's largest imperial powers, and at any time you could plausibly claim France and Britain alone could defend global trade routes, Britain, at least, still was.
You really aren't making a case for it being an easy, cheap job.
I think these trade routes etc. will stop mattering rather soon. Batteries are coming and once that's here the oil trade's gone, and then you have no need to export things to get something to trade for it, so in a decade or so none of this will matter.
International trade will go from being mandatory to optional, and thus become much less important.
I am biased here, but I look forward to the next century of Pax Europa. This is the only way forward.
My fear is that Trump sees America's position eroding quickly relative to China before his eyes and decides to do something an order of magnitude dumber than anything he's done before.
However, in isolationist MAGA, the US military is just a jobs program. This is plain facts, is it not?
The other major power of the USA, post-WWII, was "soft power." That has now been cancelled. So, I am really not sure what is happening.
I once thought that "may you live in interesting times" was a blessing. I now believe that this saying is a curse.
I think most voters think like me “I still prefer Trump to a leftist government”:
- Was there any need to be so extreme in terms of wokeness on the left? I am directly threatened by their program. Was there really any need to go for such a degree of revolution, ensuring everyone sensical would vote Trump? Could the left imagine being a little more democratic and making a few more concessions towards… omg, white males? Is it such a bane? It’s concessions for white males, or we vote for Trump, so did the left win anything with their scorched earth policy?
- It is true that savings needed to be done. The left refused to do any, and went to raise the public programs, reaching a few trillion debt per semester. At one point this has to stop, and the left ain’t gonna stop by itself, so the left provokes the people into voting for the only one who will stop public spending and, yes, he comes in, and has the bad role of taking the US to the cleaners. You will say “It doesn’t even save money” and whatsnot, but would the left have saved the money by themselves? No. Never. So someone else came in and saved for them.
This entire movement is a reactionary movement to the left. The left makes no concessions. So both sides go for a scorched earth policy.
What have we learned? What have we won, on either sides?
Do we agree that, staying closed-minded as they are, the left will resume public spendings by the trillions the moment they step into power? Do we agree that the left is a direct threat to meritocracy, stability of government, men in marriage, men at work, a direct threat to men’s financial stability, and that no-one on the left cares even a little what others-than-them feel?
I am not from the US, I am originally from Latin America. I am considered a “white male” there. I am now living in Europe as I am a dual citizen. This kind of position is interesting to me. What is so bad about being a white male in the USA at the moment?
I’d like to elaborate further, but I want to engage in an honest conversation so I would like to hear your opinion.
No comments yet
I don’t support extreme right or their hate but it looked a lot like categorical hate against my “kind” that I didn’t have part in choosing.
What got me writing is that is debt actually so bad or is it like leveraged investment? If US would have chosen a bit more professional leader capable to at least maintain the position in world economy, the debt wouldn’t likely ever have to be paid off.
Rest assured you are not. But this could turn out to be true, maybe in a very minor way, the moment your resentment towards this straw man becomes the main driver of your political views.
Americans literally thought that this extremely easy to bribe, criminal, serial adulterer, whose is most likely trying to undermine your constitution (I expect all you 2nd amendment supporters to stop touting that) was a reasonable choice.
The problem with it is that we delegate the duties towards our fellow citizens to the talking heads on TV or in our algorithmic feeds and wash our hands on it—I say “we” because it has been happening in basically every country at this point.
If democracy has failed, as some people love to say, it was not because it was supposed to fail, but because politicians have successfully managed to replace it by the current series of popularity contests we have in place.
I’m only suggesting that you deal with the feelings people are having. Which were ignored. They’re right about that.
BTW, I don’t think Joe Rogan is as bad as people think he is. All you democrats should have gone on his show.
I agree that the left should address young men’s struggles, namely the working class, but maybe not in the same sense you are implying. They are as responsible for their own political choices as anyone else.
[P.S.: Am I not from the US. How could I be a Democrat?]
I noticed that someone in America said so, but the US had been extreme, in all ways, for many years and no sane person takes the stuff coming from there as gospel.
I am not responsible for 'all the world’s injustices', and nobody had tried to make me. Maybe if I spend some time on YouTube I can find someone at an American college thinking so, or a right-wing podcast saying that people think so about me. But that is not the mainstream here.
And your woke argument is a pure strawman. What were those extreme positions by Kamala Harris?
eastbound> We need Trump because the economy is in the shitter
fabian2k> He's actually making it worse
eastbound> Well, the other side wouldn't have made it better
How do you get to have it both ways -- the economy is important enough that we need Trump, but Trump is more important despite ruining it?
Could you please explain what that threat is exactly, and what kind of “concessions to white males” you would have in mind?
- AOC, known as “the squad” (!), has claimed the Congress has too many white males. President Macron said the same about the US tech sector, and he’s not even part of the extremists, so this issue permeates society. Basically everyone says white men should be fewer of them. This is a direct threat.
- Feminism was supposed to give women more place at work and give family a better representation of both genders at home. What happened: Men can’t apply for some jobs anymore; while men are assumed to not merit to see the children by default at home. This has been going on since the 1980 in every developed country, moreso in France and US, a little less in Sweden. Judges and lawyer family courts are often 100%-women (80.2% in the profession).
- We helped women when they were 38% of the university students. But they crossed the 50% in 1990. Men now represent 39% of university students. Do we help them? No, we drop help programs. And Sweden also dropped equality programs the moment men were in need.
This is what various groups have been militanting for years, but they were harassed into submission by the left (from Facebook’s pro-left censorship at the time, to directly burning their cars or killing their dogs, and of course cancelling conference centers for men support groups which they presented as extremists - which is true, men are angry).
How is Trump helping?
- His program basis is based on a meritocratic econonic theory (that does not favour women, which is all the left complains about), but, granted, elected presidents generally implement another program, and Trump isn’t helping much,
- Men thrive in both meritocracies and in the wilderness/lawlessness, because they work more. To this, Trump has choosen the latter. The more economic crisis there is is, the weaker the government, and the more women will need men. Given the left’s program is “let’s take men’s/white’s people money”, the scorched earth is the best situation.
Granted, it would be nicer if leftists didn’t hate white men’s guts so much that they could listen to them when they make reasonable demands such as equity in family courts or meritocracy at the workplace. Barring being sensible…
It is safe to say that men are ~50% of any country's demographics. If you find any position of power and prestige where they are over-represented, it is safe to assume that there is an imbalance. People will come up with excuses for such imbalance, but one cannot deny that there is such an imbalance there.
Because as the other poster pointed out, if you push men out of the workplace and out of family life (by favoring custody for women) you just end up with a bunch of unemployed idle men, which is a recipe for revolution.
And if 50/50 is the goal, where is the government push for more men in places where they're underrepresented, like university students, nurses, teachers?
You got me, I did not express myself well. I should have said “working people”. I framed it as a women’s issue since you said that the solution to that would be forcing men to trade places with them.
Re: the fact that bringing up men’s issues is kind of taboo to the left, it seems more of a language problem. If you frame it as a “war on men”, that will turn people off. If you say: “look, there are many bright young guys who could be on college that are otherwise deciding to look for work because the economy is not so great”… Maybe people will listen.
Edit: maybe they will reply “EKSUSE MEE??? WHY NOT WOMEN???”. That is obnoxious, I get it. But do they have a point? If you think so, concede. If you do n’t think so, I would like to know more about it. That is what politics is about.
About 40% of male domestic violence victims who seek help are accused of being the abuser.
Completely coincidentally I'm sure, the federal law on domestic violence is called the "Violence Against Women Act", which furthers the bias that men can't be victims.
How would you improve the situation for male victims without making people on the left hate you?
The same people who say that "firemen" is sexist, will hypocritically say that the naming of the law isn't sexist.
The "Violence Against Women Act" is from 1994. Most statistics of that time pointed to a disproportionate amount of women being victims of domestic violence in comparison to men. I tried to find more recent statistics, but this is a very serious topic, so it deserves to be treated with more caution. Also, this is one of the reasons why I think it should not be used as a "war on men" talking point. Do we want to solve the darn problem or use it as a weapon against political opponents?
The double standard is very visible. Maybe you should just admit that the left is blatantly the "party of women's interests" and give up on gaining men's votes.
Pardon my laziness, but this is the best graph I could find on the reduction of workplace-related injuries: https://fitsmallbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Info...
This policy was very effective, in the first place. I could eyeball a 70% reduction in the period between 1972 and 2019.
Can it be reduced it even further? Probably.
Would I find it off-puting if any piece of legislation is eventually passed that addresses a hypothetical issue that is disproportionally faced by men and helps reduce it even further? Certainly not.
(I, for one, would approve of the "No More Balls Stuck in the Cogs Act".)
But the left will never prioritize men.
The left believes that any metric where women are worse off needs urgent attention, and any intervention must prioritize women.
But any metric where men are worse off can either be ignored, or fixed with an intervention that is either gender neutral, or preferably, prioritizes women again.
The left is the Party of Women.
If that doesn't work, which I believe is highly unlikely, maybe try incorporating elements of speech as those found in this right-wing publication, the World Socialist Web Site: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/02/27/hefl-f27.html
If the majority of work fatalities were women, we'd be screaming from the rooftops that "workplaces are unsafe for women"
I guess we can brush this one under the carpet, right? Nothing to see here. Workplace fatalities are a serious issue, but not so serious to you that it is worth bridging that gap. Maybe I’m wrong. Feel free to correct me if that is the case.
On the other hand, I acknowledge that men are disproportionately affected by this issue and that it deserves serious attention from both left and right. I would wholeheartedly support their demand of better working conditions from their employers and representatives, and advise them to contact the media so that the general public can be informed of that and, who knows, maybe support unionization if their demands are not met. Do you think this is a reasonable stance, or do you see any problems with that?
We could start with the resources we have already found on the Internet. I can pay for the domain if you are interested.
Well, obviously not. But there is always the caveat that suggesting government providing adequate child care to working women is communism of whatever. Is it feasible to have some compromise here?
> And if 50/50 is the goal, where is the government push for more men in places where they're underrepresented, like university students, nurses, teachers?
This sounds like a perfectly legitimate ask if young men do really care about it. Why not contact your local representative and explain the issue in an articulate manner?
You see this is the bias on the left, that everything must be framed as "for women". If the childcare is only for "working women", will a single dad not be able to access it?
Why not government providing adequate child care to working people?
> Why not contact your local representative and explain the issue in an articulate manner?
I do, but your have to admit there is a chilling effect in left wing spaces where openly supporting men's issues makes you very unpopular.
So, to put a finer point on it - you decided that aiming to destroy the United States, and the Pax Americana underlying western civilization, was an appropriate response because AOC and Macron (who represent "everyone", in your apparent media diet) hurt your feelings. As a fellow man, this is just pathetic and entitled.
There have always been groups in society you cannot criticize. There has always been groupthink bullshit that you just smile and nod, and then later share your real thoughts with your trusted close friends. The growing prevalence of talking about men's rights issues was the painstaking path to them getting better - there are some pretty harsh biological reasons why custody courts are slanted towards women, right? If you really wanted to phrase this in terms of "men", then maybe you needed to listen to your fellow wiser men telling you to hold your nose and vote conservative/democrat instead of lashing out with histrionic destruction. Alas.
The large scale facts are that under the previous administration we had working relationships with our allies, mostly functional executive agencies (aka law enforcement), and the US (ie USD) was seen as a source of stability. Meanwhile the current administration's actions are indistinguishable from a foreign power doing its best to destroy our country - we are now isolated from our allies (and even seen as hostile!), the ideal of rule of law has been replaced by brazenly corrupt rule by law, and we're staring down dedollarization.
Smarten up, quick.
Bottom line is, people see goals / intentions differently, especially in politics!
And your reasonable demands...are you seriously at a workplace where meritocracy is lived? Ever? Out of the many different non-meritocratic factors that come into play in a workplace, being male certainly was never in the top 10 for me. If anything it was an advantage. I'm sorry if you had different experiences. It's not true, where I live, that men can't apply for certain jobs, and I doubt that is the reality for you. The usual term is "everything else equal, a female candidate will be preferred", which is just an encouragement to women to apply. If you want the male candidate, you always find a reason that he is not equal to the female applicant. So if you have the feeling that you didn't get a job because you are male - perhaps it was because the female candidate was better.
And those recurring "leftist", "leftism" references make your statements a bit biased. The time to put everything in left and right categories is somewhat last century. It's all more complicated than that. Nobody hates you because your male and white. But it sure sounds a bit whiny what you are complaining about - imagine you'd be black and female, you really think you would be in a better position, you would have an advantage then? Come on.
Well, when you get that basic of a fact wrong,...
The left’s arguments are unfortunately a collection of your argument: Refuting entirely-developed speeches because of a single sentence missing one word.
To be honest, this thread has shown what weak fragile egos some white men have. So your kind has had it easy for centuries. Yeah, probably the rhetoric that's made you "the enemy" is really dumb (hey it poisoned the mind of the richest man in the world, for one), but what do you expect, mollycoddling?
Hah, maybe the whole (white) world should have a truth-and-reconciliation committee, where men are invited to discuss their privilege, and what can be changed to make an equal world. (Actually not just white, men all over the world have had this tyranny. Then again maybe it's just the animal/biological nature that we shouldn't just suppress). But even with "committee", there'll be weak egos screaming about the tyranny against them. A bit like states wanting to hide away the civil war from their education, or not even allowing discussion about systemic racism or "critical race theory" (uh oh sorry if that triggers you, if I were mocking you I'd call you a snowflake now).
Yeah if I'm looking for a caretaker for my child, a male candidate would also make me go "Huh, interesting". Women have the advantage for this job, and men have it for the CEO job, I wonder which job is more powerful in the world (if we don't pull out a philosophical idea of "powerful"...).
*when the draft is all women, but men are allowed to serve voluntarily
1. Men are on average physically stronger than women, and at their peak are physically stronger than is possible for any woman. This is more useful in a combat situation.
2. Women's bodies are specialized for pregnancy and childbirth. Without women providing this essential function, the next generation of humanity would not exist. By contrast, men are more disposable because all they do is provide the sperm.
A society where almost all women have been killed in battle cannot effectively repopulate, as there is a bottleneck of pregnancy: it is a long process that - excluding relatively rare cases of multiple births - requires one woman per newborn to conduct. A society where almost all men have been killed can repopulate much more rapidly, as it only takes a small number of men to fulfil the male reproductive role of providing sperm.
In fact the existence of sperm banks makes the widespread obliteration of males even less of a risk to the survival of humanity. Plus there is a promising subfield of stem cell research on growing viable sperm from female cells, which would remove the reliance upon males entirely.
So that’s America, no options if you want to vote for a liberal party or a conservative party.
Incorrect: This is an old argument from the left to pretend that US leftism isn’t very left.
Truth: The US government is in debt of 6 trillion per year, which makes it the most powerful government of the world. The right’s “Atlas Shrugged” vision is to have a very lean government, as in, weak and powerless as possible.
Conclusion: The American left wing proposes to build a government bigger than any socialist country in the world.
Correlation: Ironically, the leftists are often anti-war and they’d be much better defended if they supported defunding the US government to the point they couldn’t wage war outside their borders. The left should support Elon Musk ;) </s>
There is obviously multiple axises you can place the left/right on. If you want to define anyone who accepts debt as 'left', and thus the USA is leftish then... ok whatever floats your boat. Just be aware that the rest of the world sees concepts like universal healtcare and education as more important than how much debt you accept. Using debt to pay for a huge military and unsustainable low taxes is not a typical leftish view.
This is objectively not true of the right's actions. If you read Project 2025 or just look at the legislation/EOs passed, the right is currently trying to expand the power of the president to unprecedented levels. In addition, they're trying to undermine the checks and balances of the courts such that the government can make greater decisions faster.
This isn't a small government, it's teetering on fascism. The fascism analogs only grow greater when you here Trump speak of an enemy within, who must be eliminated. When he speaks as if he is the One True answer to every problem facing the US. Trump-ism is become more akin to a cult than a political platform, many people just following Trump because they view him a God. It's a bit spooky. It's very difficult to not draw parallels to fascist leaders of the past.
> Conclusion: The American left wing proposes to build a government bigger than any socialist country in the world.
Delusional, sorry. If you think the democrats, the ultra-capitalist right-leaning party, want to create a socialist country you are just delusional. I don't know how to help you there because it's just not in touch with reality.
There's, like, 2 representatives in all of the Democratic party who could maybe kind of be consider democratic-socialists. And there's a better chance of hell freezing over than those 2 convincing the other hundreds to go their way.
After a certain point, we have to come back down to Earth and acknowledge what is actually going on, instead of whatever we have allowed our minds to concoct.
I'm a white man. We already HAVE all the concessions. There's nothing left to give us. I mean, we're not gonna implement anti-racist stuff against white men because there does not exist any racism against white men. Ergo, that policy is defacto implemented.
White men also don't need DEI because we actually already have DEI. Studies show upwards of 50% increase in likelihood of being hired if you're white.
I mean, look at Trump's cabinet and admin. Full of white men... because they are white men. A lot of them are very unqualified.
> It is true that savings needed to be done.
This administration will only raise the deficit.
Also, the left at least admitted that taxes on the ultra-wealthy need to be raised. The Trump administration is continuing to raise YOUR taxes while cutting theirs. So, to recap: higher taxes for you, a greater deficit, and the programs will be cut. Wow, it's a lose-lose-lose! Almost impressive how shit conservative policy is.
> This entire movement is a reactionary movement to the left.
I applaud your honesty in admitting the reactionary nature of American conservatives.
However, you're incorrect in saying they're reacting to the left. They're not. They're reacting to a made-up version of the left. One formed and imagined through decades of conservative propaganda. One where the left are communists, baby eaters, and reptilians - not the reality, where the democratic party is a right-leaning ultra-capitalist party.
> Do we agree that, staying closed-minded as they are, the left will resume public spendings by the trillions the moment they step into power? Do we agree that the left is a direct threat to meritocracy, stability of government, men in marriage, men at work, a direct threat to men’s financial stability, and that no-one on the left cares even a little what others-than-them feel?
Uh, no.
This was like giving a crack addict a feedback loop which gives them more crack. Of course it was going to end badly.
We could discuss many possible points of inflection, but I don't want to dilute the undeniable power of the phrase "trust is efficient."
However we got here, whatever one's politics, you cannot argue against that simple phrase, and the tragedy of the loss.
___
just to give credit, it was https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=the_snooze who turned me on to these three words that have stuck in my head
Just to be clear as to what this means in politics on the ground... left or right, if you have a political position which disagrees with the biggest money, they will primary you. So, left or right, generally speaking, you only see politicians finally standing up for their morals when they are no longer up for election. The most obvious recent example of this is Mitch McConnell.
Eg, it would be perfectly fine to make insider trading legal by law. (And in fact, the definition of insider trading in the US differs a lot from the one used in France. So there are lots of things that have long been legal in the US that would have been illegal in France, without the economy collapsing.)
I agree that random enforcement of some regulations but not others depending on the whim of the executive is less than ideal.
Summary: people are already allowed to trade on inside information (in the US), if the person who officially owns the information is ok with that. The prohibition on insider trading in the US is about fiduciary duty to the owner of the information, not about protecting the general public.
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Who knows, maybe we are in the middle of the resulting collapse now ;-)
That would have been a better world than the one we live in.
I'd rather have Romney and Bloomberg etc than the populists we got.
Importantly, there's no guarantee it's actually going to get better. We like to pretend that human existence has some trajectory towards "justice" or "prosperity". I don't think that impulse does us justice.
Stalin/Lenin could have won. Hitler could have won, Napoleon could have conquered and held. It could just get worse.
I always find it so surprising how people really do believe individuals have any real power despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
It's a capitalist society so capital is power. Doesn't get simpler than that. Voting is the circus to distract us so we don't realize how much we're being exploited, while giving a sense of agency that simply does not exist.
We can choose but they pick the choices we have.
Precisely.
And now, apparently, everyone involved with it had always been against it.
If they're getting away with it, they'll do it again. The tariffs were paused for 90 days. The plan is to run the same playbook in 90 days.
Who cares if someone at the WH does insider trading? In a transparent system people would be able to trace back every transaction and realize something is brewing and they could act accordingly.
Concretely, what are you thinking of here?
In theory of course, them being blatantly and obviously corrupt would hurt them at the ballot box. In practice, this is not really something at moves the needle in American politics.
They're a derivative, so options of equities are equities and I guess options of commodities are commodities
All it needs is some kind of emergency, genuine, imaginary or self-inflicted, and ‘Oh no, we can’t possibly hold elections until our time of national crisis is over.’
I'm happy to bet. What odds to do you offer?
https://apnews.com/article/congress-save-act-citizenship-vot...
As your article discusses, requiring that proof means paperwork, paperwork some people might not have (e.g. wives who changed their names).
For example in the UK, the Windrush scandal 1) deported British subjects because the government made irrational demands for documents to prove that they're citizens.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal
They might not even need an excuse. They could just not hold elections and say "what are you going to do about it?"
You need to lay off the MAGA talking points.
Nobody is a strong word. Lots of people want elections, especially in wartime. And lots of other people don't want elections.
But it doesn't matter: the constitution of Ukraine doesn't allow elections during wartime.
I think by default constitutional rules should be followed, unless there are very good reasons not to.
> [...] I think they know which side has their best interests at heart and which is trying to genocide them.
Doesn't even need to be their best interest, really. The Ukrainian government had and has its fair share of flaws. (They exist in the real world after all.) But it's enough that they are a lot better than Russia.
Russia's takeover of Crimea in 2014 was almost as 'peaceful' as the German takeover of the Sudetenland in the 1930s.
All in all, my comment is just a convoluted way that sometimes the price to pay for peace is too high.
In addition, there's also pre-commitments that make everything more complicated: as a potential victim of invasion, you might want to pre-commit to defending long beyond any reasonable threshold, in the hopes that this will deter invasion. Sometimes your bluff gets called, and then you need to actually fight to maintain your credibility.
Compare mutual assured destruction in nuclear war: nuking Moscow in retaliation for the Soviets nuking New York isn't going to bring anyone back from the dead. But it's what you pre-commit to in order to deter the bombing of New York in the first place.
But I can very well believe that the consensus is virtually unanimous.
THE GOVERNMENT doesn't want elections in wartime. Most people want.
>not least because polling stations become targets.
I think this is pure gaslighting. If we are talking about Ukraine, Putin is one of the main supporters of holding elections there. And almost certainly not because he wants to bomb some polling stations, but because he is confident that people will vote for a candidate who will de-facto offer to surrender, and not for Zelensky with his busifications.
Because he will interfere, like he has across Europe. He is a tyrant and has only his own interests at heart.
All major political factions oppose holding elections now, because they expect Zelenskyy's popularity to fade after the war ends and believe their candidates will have better chances then.
Well, that, and also the constitution doesn't allow election during wartime.
Totally outrageous concern.
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5159951-ukraine-pre...
Zelensky is not seizing power. Elections suspended during active, home-turf wartime is normal.
Or maybe just all future times: the Court has indicated that the power may be exercised at any time after [an offense’s] commission,8 reflecting that the President may not preemptively immunize future criminal conduct.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C1-3...
He literally bragged that his friend made 2.5 billion and the other 900 million that day.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1jvyryz/tru...
To make 2.5 billion just from holdings they must have had stock holdings of 35 billion. Then the next day they lost a lot more than that. I doubt it very, very much.
"Rules for thee not for me."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/marjorie-taylor-greene-stocks-t...
So someone, somewhere, knew something before everyone else.
[1] https://www.404media.co/benzinga-news-service-that-falsely-r...
Just search for SEC insider trading cases. When they happen in options they are often pretty obvious unless the market is moving with real momentum the same way, and even then, option sellers will report you if they think it is suspicious. (By obvious, I mean, regulators should start asking questions - of course there can be a multitude of reasons.)
The difference here is that absolutely NO ONE on any side of politics seems to think the SEC & DOJ will pursue these.
I think the post established that this volume or size of spike is unique before any market-shifting news event coming out of the government in recent decades. The "sort" of transaction is irrelevant except that it's risky and thus relatively low volume normally.
It did not established that. If it was so unique, the market would have reacted to this trade (before the news).
I said it happens in individual stock cases, but very few people / places that control major market moving news leak - and when they do they investigate the hell out of it.
Imagine if this happened 20 minutes before Jerome Powell unexpectedly dropped interest rates?
This is standard practice, it was simply the marketmaker hedging its position after just having sold those $2.5 million call options.
The math checks out; at 85 cent per piece, those were 2.94 million call options. At 9 above the spot the delta was less than one so I guess you'd need to buy slightly above 2 million shares to hedge your delta. The normal SPY trades would have made up for the remainder of the 2.75 million volume.
A lot more details needed: - Is it a fund or individual? - Does the trader make these kind of trades regularly?
I have more questions, but those are the first questions I would start with. I trade 0 and 1 days quite a bit in SPY and have collected a lot of data and performed statistical analysis on them for several years now. I myself sold S&P futures options that morning based off my data.
My theory until proven otherwise - Trader makes smaller trades in 0 days regularly - market volatility and the state of that week gave a much higher probability that there would be an extreme reversal at the first sign of any hint of good news, which was proven by fake news of a tariff lift just a day or two before. The overall bearish sentiment also coiled the market for an extreme move to the upside. Adding even more probability, the market that day was at the same level from Monday, where it showed buyers were foaming at the mouth to buy. Trump tweets just after market open that it was a great time to buy. Probability increases even more...
Similar to a very high probability count in Blackjack, trader puts in a trade at 12 and has an exit plan for 1 or two hours later. Trader determines that worst case 50 to 75% of the trade is lost due to theta decay by 2pm. Maybe they have a stop at 40%? Best case 2 to 10x's their money due to support levels giving a small rally. They've done this before and the wins outweigh the losses. Maybe even a hedge fund or algo trader running an ML model.
In my data I've seen extremely large multi-million dollar call option plays regularly when there is market volatility like this. Until proven otherwise, everyone just needs to stop with the outrage. I'm completely willing to change my mind as more evidence comes out.
/klĕp-tŏk′rə-sē/ noun
A government characterized by rampant greed and corruption.
Surely it will only take a few more rounds of pump and dumping the entire US economy for basically every country to label the US the same, and move away from US bonds and the US dollar as reserve currency. It just won’t be stable enough with all these antics.
When it happens I just hope trump won’t use it as justification for war.
We will see.
> My previous post highlighted a striking example: how a single $2.5 million options position turned into $70 million in under an hour. But focusing solely on that trade risks missing the larger picture. What we actually saw was widespread activity. Numerous sophisticated traders carefully placing positions across several strike prices ($504, $505, $507, $509) in SPY as well as similar trades in QQQ.
> The pattern wasn't limited to a single trade or strike price. It was a coordinated wave of positions, all established within a critical half-hour window before the news broke.
> Imagine someone purchasing thousands of lottery tickets with a specific number combination just moments before those exact numbers are drawn.
https://data-and-politics.ghost.io/this-is-what-insider-trad...
It's treason what they did, treason on their principles. All this in times when it was supposedly "Main Street" turn.
https://x.com/SecScottBessent/status/1910000578198986822
Apparently most of them are just temporarily embarrassed billionaires.
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I believe he's right, but would just like some more proof that it's really extraordinarily rare to place such a big bets, especially on 0DTEs (which I believe did not exist in 2008).
This culminated in Trump v. United States [1] where unelected partisans simply invented presidential immunity completely out of thin air. That means there are absolutely no possible legal repercussions for any of this. None. And even if there were, the agencies in charge of enforcing it have either been gutted or they've been subverted by putting a sycophantic lackey in charge.
This is the new kleptocracy we live in. Nobody is coming to save us. The supposed political opposition (ie the Democratic Party) is nothing more than feckless controlled opposition who are more interested in defending US imperialism than they are in winning elections.
Things are only going to get worse.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States
The only people that can save it are regular people standing up and taking action.
»This Is What Insider Trading Looks Like«
https://data-and-politics.ghost.io/this-is-what-insider-trad...
That's called freedom my friends.
https://beatofhawaii.com/why-these-hawaii-travelers-were-jai...
- held for an indefinite time without due process and information what you did wrong
- stripped naked and spilled with cold water
- potentially worse, but that depends entirely on the way things are developing on a day-by-day basis
And if someone thinks that won't happen to them because they come from a western country and have a low eumelanin pigmentation level, recent examples show that this does not matter¹. Remember ICE also appears to want to police "illegal ideas" at the border now².
These arbitrary arrests, a disregard for the Rule of Law and the valuation of loyalty to the cause over predictable consequences fit the despotic style that is encouraged in the US from the top down lately. The world would be wise not continue betting all their cards on a crazy horse.
¹: Germany, Feb 2025 – Tourist held 16 days at border, deported without clear reason. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-immigration-detaining-europe... UK, Mar 2025 – Backpacker held 3 weeks at Canada border, no charges. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/22/tourism-trum... Germany, Mar 2025 – Visitor held 45 days under Visa Waiver, unclear why. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-detention-of-european... Canada, Mar 2025 – Woman with valid visa held 12 days at border. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-immigration-detaining-europe... UK, Mar 2025 – Punk band denied entry, detained at LAX. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/22/tourism-trum... Germany, Mar 2025 – Green card holder detained at Boston airport. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/22/tourism-trum... Multiple, Mar 2025 – ICE arrested 48 in NM; cause/details unclear. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-mystery-of-ices-...
²: ICE posted a very "unfortunate" marketing picture recently: https://www.newsweek.com/ice-illegal-ideas-border-security-s...
I grew up in a tourism country and the number one rule of tourism is that if you want people to come hospitality goes a long way. A mad-king-leader calling them freeloaders and quoting Napoleon with "He who saves his country, violates no law" and a cult like followership doesn't exactly instill confidence that your rights will be respected when you go there.
The current administration seems to be downright hostile to everybody who isn't a US citizen even if we'd just come to spend our money in the US. Pair that with a lack of basic oversight over your cops/TSA-agents/whatever and suddenly the US just isn't as attractive any more.
Don't get me wrong, I find the US fascinating, but given I am in the middle of Europe, I have many destinations with a friendlier atmosphere and a more reliable political leadership to chose from.
People buy options all the time, sometimes without any insider information, people buy options that happen to just perfectly line up with major market moving events.
Look at 9/11, there were several trades made right before the planes hit that paid out big time. The SEC investigated and found no evidence of insider information.
https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/hearings/hearing1/witnes...
If the price had stayed flat or dropped, they would of course still have the $2.5M.
The precision makes it look a lot like a crime, as trading on information that's not publicly available is illegal.
Owning the stock is a specific lower risk strategy called a covered call.
Whoever shorted those calls made some money in the contracts, but they were going to lose money anyway the moment of the announcement.
But why not earlier in the day? Why this unique volume spike then? The one $2.5M is just a sample trade, part of a historic spike.
No one's jumping to conclusions, but it should trigger an investigation.
Why? A secretary or janitor or a intern could also be an insider. Or are they No True Scotsmen?
I thought the article itself and comments here presume bad faith on behalf of the highest ranking officials.
About the specifics we have here:
It's sad that the highest ranking officials are willing to corrupt themselves over a few million here or there. (And that's already pretty high by corruption standards. Usually you here of even much lower bribes etc being enough.)
To be pithy: I'm not angry that you can buy officials and politicians. I'm angry that the price is so low.
0 day - means it's a win big or loose 2.5M on a single day move.
Well, if it was insider trading, Trump and his billionaire friends wouldn't invest just 2.5 million. That's a meager sum for the very wealthy.
Maybe they've even done insider trading but in ways that weren't so obvious.
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I can't even buy sudafed without 3 forms of ID, yet we have 'invisible' traders of millions of dollars?
There is no need for scientists to prove we’re living inside a simulation, this whole global turn based strategy financial game, affecting our lives, is the proof that someone is having a laugh at/with us ;-)
All I know and have in my life is thanks to public funding. Social Democracy works and is good for business too. A state with little financial regulation in the end also has less power and control sum total.
Since the southern US basically survives off slave laborers with no paperwork and giving any normal human decency to those people would probably lower the Murican standard of living I have low hopes for change. Here in the EU we screwed ourselves too haha. No one really looks out for the little guy anymore.
There is a common believe that humans would never be generous, altruistic without a State forcing them. And that’s actually quite the opposite. Humankind would have never made it if that was the case. You can observe it clearly still in lots of societies populating earth, specially the poorest ones without public services.
It’s actually the unconditional access to public services that has incentivized the individuality of our society nowadays. If I’m already supported by the State why should I make any effort towards my society? In the past without public services, interaction with your local community was a must.
But it’s also a problem as a donor or supporter: how can I support or donate to any cause if the State is already taxing 50% of my wealth and I have barely any money to buy a house?
Eu-person: how? (Pleas stay relevant to your whole comment).
All these worthless paperless money as you call it are precisely also instruments for companies and individuals to gain some economical stability during uncertain times by buying contracts and shifting the risk to someone else that has either more financial means or has worked to have a better view of future conditions.
So as an example, your medical insurer and your car insurer know pretty well the odds of you needing either medical treatment or suffering some type of car accident. And because they also have the financial means to risk being wrong, they offer you an insurance, because in the aggregated number they are usually right in their predictions.
How many physicians have been able to get rich from learning a CEO will be out of commission? In that case, I'm not even sure whether it would be considered insider trading.
How does one even go about accusing someone of insider trading? The illegality sounds pretty unenforceable.
Do you actually have an answer to that? Or are you just throwing out an unanswerable question as some form of “gotcha”?
Now I’m actually curious. There aren’t _that_ many publicly traded companies; only about 4,000 according to Google. A little over 9,000 IPOs since 1980 [0]. The number of companies where the CEO being “out of commission” on such a short timescale would generate “rich” (to me, in this scenario, >$5 million) levels of ROI has to be pretty low up. Probably not even most of the Fortune 100. Then the number of doctors who have that info and are going to act on it is a smaller fraction. Then the three have to match (command that fits + ill CEO + trading physician). Do you think it’s over 10? 25?
0. https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/files/IPO-Statistics....
But most businesses don't need such large capital injections anyway. They can grow organically, and there's very little reason to sell a profitable company. Although it does happen, of course, Google being a prime example, having gone public when already profitable.
"The sample is composed of the IPOs of U.S.-based companies with an offer price of at least $5.00 and listed on the NYSE (excluding NYSE American and NYSE MKT issues after the merger in 2008) or Nasdaq (excluding Nasdaq small cap issues before October 2005 and, after Sept. 2005, Nasdaq capital market issues), excluding ADRs, unit offers, SPACs, closed-end funds, REITs, partnerships, banks and S&Ls, and stocks not listed on CRSP (CRSP includes Amex, NYSE, and NASDAQ stocks)"
You can switch up the doctor and CEO patient for anything else. Bankers, lenders, family friends, former professors ... An unbounded number of humans that can come into contact with useful info to trade on. What do we think are the magical constraints that prevent them from doing so? Corporate etiquette?
The ROI will obviously be a function of what information is passed. But I think that I'm more interested in understanding how often it happens rather than that any one case is "low ROI". It is interesting to consider whether it's the ROI threshold that should philosophically make/not make something insider trading.
That would be like saying there are 300 million peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches eaten a year because that’s the total number of sandwiches made in a year. https://www.ezcater.com/lunchrush/office/state-of-the-sandwi...
> Friends, business associates, family members, and other "tippees" of such officers, directors, and employees, who traded the securities after receiving such information;
And there are much more situations that will influence stock prices than a company changing its CEO. Those situations can be both internal and external to a company.
So I think we potentially have thousands or tens of thousands of people who learn information that make them rich if they act quickly. And even that has a multiplying factor since those people have friends and family.
"Hey Bill, wanna make a quick buck? As soon as market opens buy XYZ. You don't know it from me and I didn't call you today."
Ok, but I was responding to a specific claim from the parent comment specifically mentioning physicians.
For example, imagine you are working for Warren Buffet and you learn that he has quietly bought some stocks and next weeks he's going to announce that. Assume that this announcement will reliably make the stock trade up. If you trade on that information, that's insider trading by US laws.
However, now imagine that you are Warren Buffet. You just quietly bought some stock, and you plan to announce that fact next week. If you trade on that information about your intentions, that's not insider trading by US law: you are allowed to trade on your own private intentions and information.
Notice that from the point of view of the anonymous counter party trading with you on the stock exchange, both situations look exactly the same.
That's an illustration that insider trading law in the US is not supposed to protect the public. (At least not originally.) So making insider trading legal in the US wouldn't make the general public any worse off.
Of course, IANAL applies. The above explanation is mostly paraphrased from Matt Levine's Money Stuff.
Some economists suggest that insider trading is good for public markets, because it disseminates information. (However fiduciary duties would still apply. But they would only allow the company to sue the vice president who told her golf buddy about the upcoming earnings, but could not sue the golf buddy.)
From [0]: >Because insider trading undermines investor confidence in the fairness and integrity of the securities markets, the SEC has treated the detection and prosecution of insider trading violations as one of its enforcement priorities.
So it _kinda_ is supposed to protect the public.
0. https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43662242
Eh? If nothing else, doesn't it magnify the public's risk beyond whatever impact Buffet could have on his own? How can you possibly claim there is no difference?
You might as well say: imagine you secretly give another country nuclear weapons, and assume that that country plans to use them. Now imagine you plan to use them for the same purpose yourself. From the viewpoint of the public, the situation is exactly the same. So nuclear proliferation wouldn't make the general public any worse off.
Or imagine the president picks a random person by lottery every day to run the country while he goes to play golf. The president can take the same actions himself, so from the standpoint of the general public, nobody would be worse off.
Let me be more explicit: Warren Buffett usually doesn't physically execute his own trades. So the only difference between the two scenarios I outlined is that in the second one Warren Buffett tells you (as his employee) to trade. In the first one, you trade without him telling you to do so.
But it's the same person doing the trades in either scenario.
> Or imagine the president picks a random person by lottery every day to run the country while he goes to play golf. The president can take the same actions himself, so from the standpoint of the general public, nobody would be worse off.
Sortition might actually be a good idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
Fiduciary duty is an important concept in any case, yes.
>> If nothing else, doesn't it magnify the public's risk beyond whatever impact Buffet could have on his own?
I am saying that when you let others pull the same trick in addition to Buffet himself, they can now bring their own additional funds to play with -- meaning they can make more trades and cause even more damage than Buffet could inflict on his own. This clearly enlarges the blast radius and allows more harm to the public than Buffet could cause with his own funds. It is ludicrous to close your eyes and suggest the situation is no different, just like it is by suggesting that there's no difference between one country having nukes vs. N of them having them.
Heck, the fact that Warren Buffet is used as the example here instead of some random John Doe makes it clear how intentionally ridiculous the example is: for this to even pass the laugh test and obscure the reality of the situation, you have to pick one of richest people of all time, so that even aggregating a thousand other random strangers' funds together would still miss his purchasing power by multiple orders of magnitude.
Why don't you start with someone poor instead of Buffet, then add Buffet to the equation, then try to claim that bringing the billionaire into the equation makes no difference, rather than the other way around?
Buffett is not inflicting damage on anyone by trading on his intentions. Neither would anyone else.
Also: the typical 'insider' in insider trading cases has far less budget to bring to bear than the typical principal. Eg Warren Buffett (and Berkshire Hathaway) are richer than Warren Buffett's assistant.
Also: 'insider trading' is perfectly legal for commodities and foreign exchange, and the markets in these work perfectly well.
> Why don't you start with someone poor instead of Buffet, then add Buffet to the equation, then try to claim that bringing the billionaire into the equation makes no difference, rather than the other way around?
I'm very poor compared to Warren Buffett. If Warren Buffett wanted to trade on any information I held, I'm very sure we could work out a deal.
Due to insider trading rules being problematic, sometimes more headache than benefit, the UK FCA is now allowing new stock market to launch where insider trading is legal.
Much of it is data analysis. My favorite examples of this are actual hacks - once foothold is established instead of encrypting & ransoming, the attacker just listens to the CEO/CFO. One hacked a law firm that handled some sizable mergers.
Personal tangent: Once had an opportunity to insider trade on a particular huge aerospace company. Playing a squad-based PvE game, matchmade into a team with 3 real-life friends at said company who chatted on in-game voice comms about their day, talking about court cases and senate hearings, and later panicked when they realized I could hear it all. They were nice guys, and I assured them that I wouldn't misuse what I overheard - I don't work in a relevant industry, and my investments do just fine without an illegal edge (plus I know Matt Levine's Laws of Insider Trading #1: Don't).
Because it maybe up a bit or down a bit, but that's all going to measured relative to assumptions the market has and those assumptions aren't public either.
His Truth Social post that day saying (quote) “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!” immediately gave any insider traders a perfect alibi.
This could lead to a lot of investment in the U.S. being diverted elsewhere to markets that have some kind of regulation to prevent abuse.
+There are some non-gambling reasons for stock options trading, akin to commodities options being used to reduce risks in farming.
https://unusualwhales.substack.com/p/unusual-options-trading...
And looking at the options flow, it was billions across all the unusual 0DTE trades.
Elect a felon, you get felonies.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.
Therefore the outcome is always the same.
> If the trades hadn’t worked out, the losses would have been swift and total. Zero-day options don’t forgive bad timing. The entire $2.5 million could have evaporated by the close of trading. Even with SPY shares, any unexpected reversal would have meant millions in losses.
This has exactly been Taleb’s strategy. Buy option where the writeoff is small when wrong and the payoff huge when correct. As described in the post, the ratio was 1 to 25. Also it was likely that the market would go through huge shifts because the policy is so unpredictable.
So it is not impossible that someone figured that it would be possible to just buy these calls for the whole month. As long as one was a hit, the trade would not make a loss. And given the volatility, at least one would be a hit in this month. These short option bets are truly not such strange ehm options in these volatile times.
So I would like some data about whether similar options were bought on other days in similar volumes.
Having said that, I do find the evidence very strong and it’s reasonable to assume that this was insider trading. I personally suspect someone at JPM or Ackman. They said they “convinced” Trump so maybe Trump said in a meeting that it would probably happen and they immediately bought the calls.
The option to buy at 2.5m was not an obligation to do so
And it's bullshit that you can reliably make money of such low probability options. Even if you do, you never put $2.5 million on something with a huge probability of ending in a complete loss, these deep out of the money options are essentially lottery tickets.
I do buy slightly OTM options and it's barely profitable and even so I think mostly out of pure luck. No way would someone have done this trade without inside info.
Nassim Taleb: "I was effectively short volatility. [...] I would have been harmed by small movements. I was set up to be harmed by small movement and gain if the move continues to something very large." [1]
He also described in one of his books that this strategy works because on most days you will lose money, and most people psychologically don't like that. But you have to ignore that and keep betting until you suddenly make a lot of money.
In case you don't know Taleb and would like to point out that he probably is a fraud, please note that his books and articles have been cited 39946 times according to Google Scholar. See also his Wikipedia [2]. Although I am aware that these are all popularity-based metrics, I unfortunately don't have a better metric available. I invite you to read his books for yourself and make your own decision on his credibility.
> I do buy slightly OTM options and it's barely profitable and even so I think mostly out of pure luck. No way would someone have done this trade without inside info.
Okay if the discussion is whether this particular trade was unlikely I can agree, but your "No way" makes no sense to me.
[1]: https://youtu.be/pavjXIkARS4
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
Taleb's point seems more to be that he saw a mispricing and traded on it one day, rather than anything profound regarding option pricing, unless I am missing something. Anyway, it has little to do with what's being said in the article.
Now that you say it could be that he misspoke indeed.
> Taleb's point seems more to be that he saw a mispricing and traded on it one day
Okay so Taleb was literally an "option trader" as in he traded one option on one day in his life?
> Anyway, it has little to do with what's being said in the article.
How is Taleb, who is an option trader and who has written about options trading for years, not related to an article on an options trade?
I should be clear that what you seem to think ties these together, i.e:
> given the volatility, at least one would be a hit in this month.
I don't actually believe to be true. It's not like these options aren't being priced somewhat accurately. There could be insanely high volatility and all that needs to happen is for the price to go up instead of down for none of your options to "hit."
The volumes are there for all to see and the answer is no.
I'm surprised if they would let the trades go through at all once they know the secret.
he actually posted at 1:18. not that there is nothing to see here, but it would help the credibility if the article was accurate
Due to many factors (mostly around the crash that was in full swing, and a bond market that was illiquid and melting down), this was a key moment around which a huge amount of position management happened.
I'm not at all saying that there shouldn't be extensive investigation around insider trading around the Trump announcement. There obviously should be. And I'm also not saying that a big block of calls wouldn't fit the bill for that. It would (although it begs the question about the actor being so brazen. There would be countless ways to hide the bet more effectively while still producing insane profit).
What I am saying is that it's ridiculous to me that there's no discussion about the bond auction! First of all you can't just look at a block of option contracts independently many of them are part of wider trade structures. Those call options could have just been hedging short portfolio deltas, or be part of any number of strategies. The timing does signify that you ever executed the trade, ill intentioned or not, was aware of bond auction mechanics.
So you're starting to run into some Occam's razor territory here. Either the participant was sophisticated enough to understand the volume surge around bond auction data releases yet chose to do an incredibly boneheaded bet (instead of some sort of more cloaked relative value trade that would make 10x as well, or just making a bet on something slightly less obvious like credit spreads or ETFs that are trade-war exposed, etc), or the participant was making a clumsy obvious swing for the fences, yet lucked into to the minute perfect timing to cloak the transaction. Meanwhile there is the simplest answer which is just that the position was part of the huge wave of trading around the bond auction results.
I'd welcome the investigation, but it's pretty shocking to me that I'm seeing so much discussion around this without these points being brought up!
I manage a portfolio and also put large blocks of options that benefit from market rallies on at exactly the same time. That's because Bond volatility was sky high, and once the results came in, one of the likely outcomes is a huge volatility crush. That means that if you have positions that you've been holding from executing off during the crisis due to elevated volatility, and have a view that the market is nearing the end of capitulation (all of the indicators that most fear, like liquidations, fear/greed index tanking, positioning being bearish, are huge bullish signals to the trading world), then in order to dodge the binary event risk you may want to re-add exposure at that moment. Readings from prime broker reports show that institutional participants were extremely low in positioning, so the risk that would need to be hedged for many would have been upside risk. If someone wants to hedge their upside risk but doesn't want to actively move out of their bearish/locked down positions during the crisis, they may well use options.
(Devil's advocate argument concluded)
Why would someone hedge with 0DTE options as opposed to normal options?
I’m no longer in that space, but I’d assume the OOTM strikes are less liquid than normal options, with higher theta as well. That looks like a very expensive hedge.
What kind of position would be hedged with these options that couldn’t be hedged with normal options?
I’d assume the theta would be higher for 0dte? With normal options you could just roll out of them the next day. I guess you would be crossing 2 bid ask spreads, but is that more expensive than the theta decay?
I'm curious if you could evaluate an AI response from Perplexity. I asked it to analyze your comment (https://www.perplexity.ai/search/summarize-https-govinfo-lib...) and would value your expert assessment of its accuracy and quality. Perhaps a grade score with brief comments on what stood out?
I feel current AI benchmarks don't capture the data to really gauge how reliable AI tools are for topics requiring some advanced/expert domain knowledge of. Your role is, "expert in the middle" to provide commentary on what it gets right or wrong. Everything sounds right and looks right when I don't know what is what ya know?
Unfortunately half the comments I read on here are becoming increasingly more reddit-esque. Users posting emotionally charged comments and speaking with an authoritative voice on topics they have little experience or knowledge in an accordingly Hacker News has become more and more useless as a news source.
From the guidelines¹:
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a² semi³-noob⁴ illusion⁵, as⁶ old⁷ as⁸ the⁹ hills¹⁰.
¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
² https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1524184
³ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703
⁴ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582513
⁵ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582513
⁶ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254
⁷ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253657
⁸ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057
⁹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60767
¹⁰ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852
"Remember, kids, Clinton got a blowjob and Obama wore a beige jacket."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43661781
So you are going to post this in retaliation and not take a look at how useless this comment is?
But complaining that HN is becoming Reddit is (as demonstrated by the links) a tired, repetitive, and incorrect complaint that creates noise and does not advance the discussion. Which is why the guidelines ask you to not do it.
he literally told everyone to do it
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1143082727259...
and you might have felt especially confident if you recalled him doing the exact same thing in 2018
He literally bragged that his friend made 2.5 billion and the other 900 million that day.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1jvyryz/tru...
Anyone who held equities that day were up 6-7%, so many billionaires were up that much or more without touching their holdings.
He told everyone what he was going to do. A lot of people thought he was a lying politician who lies, and therefore these were all lies. Or, at best, jokes or exaggerations.
And now, 4 months into a 4 year term, he's doing it all. Who knew?
So when he jokes that he can do whatever he wants, including run for a third term, learn from the past: it isn't a joke, even if he's chuckling; it isn't an exaggeration; it's not a lie. It's real, it's the plan. Decide how you feel about it.
I'm not criticising anyone or anything here, I'm just stating facts. It's sad to me that so many people think this is all coming as some sort of huge surprise.
No comments yet
So it becomes a "seat at the table is better than no seat" thing where they won't ask Trump these questions.
Had to look it up, thanks!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_contro...
For most people, getting blowjobs from a subordinate in the office during work hours would result in more than just a warning.
We don't even know who made these trades.
If we look at actual trades by politicians who actually sit on committees with tradable information, we know the biggest culprits are on both sides of the aisle.
https://newrepublic.com/post/177806/members-congress-made-st...
https://youtu.be/KJ3Lowk_064?si=896OqeAOlC5_0xzh
Nancy Pelosi (Democrat) made this famous in last decade, hitting news headlines with it:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nancy-pelosi-outperformed-nea...
https://nypost.com/2024/09/27/us-news/trump-calls-for-nancy-...
Inside trading rules concern only leaking corporate-private insider information.
And if you look at the trades, you’ll learn the biggest secret on Wall Street: make long term bets on tech and you’ll get richer. Don’t tell anyone I told you.
In the case of Pelosi, she became so famous about this that there are various Nancy Pelosi stock trackers now.
Pelosi’s rate of return isn’t the highest (in 2024, it was 10th, less than half the highest). If you analyze their trades, very few are suspect of timing. They just make a bunch of long term bets on tech.
https://www.fool.com/research/congressional-stock-trading-wh...
But what about the ones that very obviously are? Why did they sell a lot of Visa stocks?
"On Tuesday, less than three months after the massive transaction, Visa was hit with a DOJ lawsuit alleging that the company illegally monopolized the debit card market."
Selling whenever a company gets into regulatory trouble means you avoid all the big downs but still get from all the long term ups. Its a very simple strategy as you say, but its still insider trading even though the ups are mostly the long term gains.
Ok, I guess you got me there. I guess there is no explanation why they sold $500k-$1m Visa on July 01, 2024, almost 3 months before the Sep 24, 2024 DOJ lawsuit. It's not like Visa was in a already in in a slump since the beginning of the 2024, going in the opposite direction of their tech-based stocks [it was]. It's not like they have been slowly shedding Visa for the past decade, every couple of years [they have been]. And they must certainly have closed out their full position in Visa at tht time [they didn't]. In theory it could be possible that they were shedding that to load up on $2m-$10m of NVDA around the same time [like everybody else was]. But that would be too convenient [it's not]. And they certainly made the right choice, Visa currently being ~22% above the point that they sold at; they sure saved a lot of money doing that [they lost out on money].
Rather than taking for gospel what the leader of the opposing party and it's media arms are telling you to believe (especially when many get the value wrong), I strongly urge you to consider the factual data and draw conclusions for yourself.
And then, when you want to basically match Pelosi's trades - go load up on VOO or similar like the rest of us did in 2024.
- https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/V/ - https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/V/VOO - https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/politician/Nancy... - https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/202... - https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/FinancialDisclosure
That's a good question and let's use that example.
According to the article and as you mentioned, they sold Visa stock less than 3 months ago and THEN the DOJ filed a lawsuit against the company.
So how did Pelosi know that that would cause the stock to drop and the DOJ was going to file it? The lawsuit wasn't public months ago and it is related to none other than the government which she has access to.
Then she traded with that information with no downside risk which she benefited from.
If that is not an insider trading loophole, I don't know what is.
>Then she traded with that information with no downside risk which she benefited from.
>If that is not an insider trading loophole, I don't know what is.
Yes, if you start with the conclusion (that she traded because of the impending DOJ lawsuit), then, yes, you will reach the conclusion that she insider traded because of the DOJ lawsuit.
If you instead ask why they might have traded Visa at the time they did, you will see that there were many valid reasons that they (and many, many others) decided it was a good time to sell. And as it turns out, they were all wrong, because Visa is up compared to the broad market since their sell date (July 1, 2024).
https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/V/SPY
All said in hindsight today, but never for those who benefitted from the insider information. Investors will always buy the stock after it plummets, whilst those who didn't sell had to wait or buy lower to break even.
This does not excuse the fact that the Pelosis' benefitted from insider (political) information and traded on that, like this blatant example. An advantage that neither of us have.
Defending politicians trading on insider info (political or economic) isn't the hill one should die on. If you did exactly that and made tens of millions, you would be in prison and be replying to me years later telling others not to do it.
You, nor others, have not actually proven that.
>Defending politicians trading on insider info (political or economic) isn't the hill one should die on.
Right, and that’s not what I’m doing. I think politicians in top levels of government should be banned from trading their own stocks (and family, etc.). (Though admittedly I don’t know exactly what that looks like) They should be serving the people, not themselves.
But if I tell you sandwiches should be banned because they are bad for you and I bring you a bowl of pasta as an example of their harmful ways, I’m going to look silly, aren’t I?
In the Pelosis' circumstance, clearly their repeated actions of such trades and their connection to the timing of key legislation or lawsuits requires no further proof, given their long history of this front-running such that other congressmen and women are doing the same thing believing they can get away with the insider trading loophole.
By inspection, it is quite obvious to see how one can repeatedly front-run legislation ahead of everyone else and outperform the market.
> Right, and that’s not what I’m doing. I think politicians in top levels of government should be banned from trading their own stocks (and family, etc.).
Why not ban them from trading all stocks instead of just their own and why only those just from "top levels" of government?
They are serving the people as well and there shouldn't be exceptions for those that have access to that level of legislation before it is made public and then trade against it no?
Claiming this happens, no matter how many times you repeat it (without evidence) does not mean it happens.
Clearly, Your repeated denial of fact implies that it is instead _you_ are trading on insider information. The evidence is all right there. You should be locked up.
>it is quite obvious to see how one can repeatedly front-run legislation ahead of everyone else and outperform the market
Yes, by doing exactly what the the Pelosis and many of us did in the same time period: invest heavily in tech. I have have about double the rate of return since 2020 than the Pelosis. Many of my moves independently mimic theirs. I personally got out of Visa in Spring of 2024, also in favor of NVDA. Am I insider trading?
You already know they did and yet still continue to defend politicians like the Pelosis' trading on insider political AND legislative information before it it released publicly and that privileged access entirely benefits them, not retail investors like yourself.
So, I don't think you even believe in what you just said about supporting a ban on politicians front-running the market. It should be ALL of them and there are zero exceptions.
It's as if you really want politicians to continue front-running the market with the sort of access that they have.
> Clearly, Your repeated denial of fact implies that it is instead _you_ are trading on insider information. The evidence is all right there. You should be locked up.
You got it all mixed up and it is other way round.
I'm not the one here admitting on this site to be "trading" or copying politicians trades to get an "edge" (it really isn't) like the Pelosis' and others (who truly have insider access to decision making legislation) really have on their trades.
The stock can drop / rise before the disclosure and you would always be behind regardless. So this accusatory comment is hilarious and laughable coming from someone like you supporting politicians using such loopholes for years.
The entire point is, if YOU did that yourself, made millions BEFORE the release of key legislation and knew people with connections to congress or the government; YOU would be talking to me on this site from your prison cell telling others to not do it.
And yet, here you are without of that.
As such, it is doubly clear, as described above, that you are insider trading. I hope that you are prosecuted to the fullest extent.
You realize that what you just posted was aiding for supporting corrupt insider trading activities in congress such as [0] and [1] in both parties?
Why do you think a bi-partisan total ban on stocks for all politicians never goes forward? [2] [3] Because at least for (some) congress-people they already know that insider trading and front-running on key information can and does indeed happen.
Which is something you would be against given the Pelosis' and others directly benefitting from this loophole, like the Nvidia [1] and Google trades [3] all timed in connection to key decisions from the government.
> As such, it is doubly clear, as described above, (baseless) that you are insider trading (citation needed). I hope that you are prosecuted to the fullest extent. (no case)
Except I didn't copy or trade on anything. You admitted to what you are (baselessly) accusing me of. Also...
It's extremely more likely that you (not any congress-person) as a retail trader would be investigated and prosecuted (and jailed) for insider trading than any other congress-person, if you knew someone with political insider information and traded on that.
But please continue to defend your politicians front-running you with their insider advantage.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/marjorie-taylor-greene-stocks-t...
[1] https://nypost.com/2022/07/27/pelosis-sold-5m-in-nvidia-stoc...
[2] https://readsludge.com/2024/12/30/ro-khannas-loophole-laden-...
[3] https://fitzpatrick.house.gov/_cache/files/b/1/b1ef11f4-5242...
[4] https://www.newsweek.com/odd-timing-nancy-pelosis-google-sto...
Here we have people defending politicians from benefiting from insider information and attempting to split hairs in what is the difference between Pelosi and Trump.
There isn't any.
There is no difference in them knowing something ahead of you and they may have already traded that ahead of the event. (and you copying it very late when the move has already happened).
They benefit, you do not.
The whole goal of the stock market is to come up with information that people don’t generally have (insider trading) either from research, or secret info, so you can dupe everyone else’s money.
Have a limit on how frequently a company can get revalued (months).
Do everything possible to make it a long term investment tool and not something that can be easily gamed. This is also less stressful for the individual investor — most people I know who trade stocks also check the stocks 10+ times per day and it occupies such a large area of their headspace.
Is that not the SEC and Generally Accepted Accounting Principals (GAAP)?
> Have a limit on how frequently a company can get revalued (months).
Is that not quarterly reports and earnings filings?
> Do everything possible to make it a long term investment tool and not something that can be easily gamed
Your suggestion was to delete it. One suggestion I've heard is to increase the transaction price, and marginally increase it with trading volume by the given actor. Micro-transactions become too expensive to be profitable.
There is also the Machiavellian consideration of external threats. We need these corporations to make the tools of Ahriman. Without them, another country's corporations will make them first, and use them to subjugate us. People who believe in God (not just the Abrahamic one, but any good creator) prefer not to play this game, but most people are strict materialists, so they are locked into this equation.