Daily Lessons from Life 16-17 December 2010 - Insiders Trade

Another crackdown on insiders trading in the USA high tech industry and the hedge funds.

Another open secret that was perhaps tolerated by people in the know. Employees or executives in high tech companies 'selling' or 'trading' information on high growth technologies companies they worked for or supplied to to high powered investment bankers or financers should not be a new phenomenon surely! Just that someone decided it is time to be tough and not played dead!!

Lessons for me are:

1. informaton is valuable. If such information disadvantaged the investing public too much, the authority has to act and act decisively, swiftly and mercilessly;

2. it is difficult to have valuable information on some stock trading darlings in your course of work and NOT be tempted to profit from it somehow somewhat. Yet, if you are in a senior enough position, you know that this is the price you have to pay. Be given privilege information that you CANNOT profit from personally. It is about integrity. Hopefully your executive pay is sufficient for you NOT to think of another easy way to make more money!!;

3. having said that in para 2 above, it is quite natural for the person to justify his or her actions by saying: what he or she is paid is simply not enough!! Strange naturally tendency for the rich to want to be richer!! Maybe we need to find out how they spent these easy money? In Singapore, some crooks used their ill-gotten money to buy supercars that they wrecked in accidents as they could not handled the speed of the cars! LOL!!

May capitalist system lives to fight another day. Greed left unchecked cannot be good.