Actually, the real legal insider trading is the trades that you _don’t_ place based on insider knowledge. Eg, if you know that the iPhone is years ahead of everything else and you happen to be holding Apple stock, then you won’t let whoever is managing your portfolio sell any of it when otherwise you may not have cared. There’s no way to prove illegality for _not_ placing a trade.

Knowing that a new competitor has entered the market with a superior product is not inside information. The iPhone was public knowledge (that is how the Nokia engineers, who were not Apple insiders, knew about it). Nokia's existing offering was also public knowledge. Sure, some members of the public might have speculated that maybe Nokia was about to respond with its own killer smartphone, and Nokia insiders knew that wasn't the case. But that's not concrete information. Not to mention that "we can't compete with Apple" is ultimately a matter of opinion/prediction, not concrete information.

This has nothing to do with inside information or insider trading, it is just "if your company is bad, maybe you should go work for a better company".

Also it reeks of AI.

I watched "Enron: The smartest guys in the room" documentary, and I think Lou Pai is the most fascinating character in the story.

As quoted online:

Lou Pai was a senior executive at Enron who, after having an affair with a stripper, to satisfy his divorce settlement, cashed out $250 million of his Enron stock just before the company's stock price collapsed and it filed for bankruptcy protection.

I don't know if he ever knew about the stuff that was going down at Enron, but that guy managed to leave the ship in a nice boat before it sank.

This is a bad analogy because it perpetuates a misconception of the basis of insider trading law (in the US).

Insider trading has nothing to do with having an information advantage. The markets and their regulators encourage those with an information advantage to use it to as full advantage as they can.

Insider trading is based on having an economic obligation to someone else. If you use your knowledge to make money and you don’t share that equitably with the people you have that obligation to, that’s insider trading (in the US).

You’d have to torture that definition for it to make sense in the job market and none of the examples in the article match.

This is not only is obviously AI writing, it feels like it is the output of a single prompt completely unedited. With some AI generated comics thrown in.

I think the major reason the Nokia engineers didn't jump ship to Apple/Google is that they did not want to move to another country.

The article is written like it assumes the Nokia HQ was next door to Apple/Google.

There is another type of insider trading: If an engineer had stayed at Nokia but bought a lot of shares in Apple after Apple launched the iPhone, would that still be considered insider trading when the engineer did not have any non-public information about Apple, only in which way the general market was moving?

A lot of people laughed at smart phones in 2007-2010, the market majority did not value them and did not predict Apple's stock would grow.

This is not an “insider trading”, it is an insider’s knowledge (affinity to knowledge) and ability to use it.

This is information asymmetry. The nokia engineers knew something that the rest of the world didn't and were able to use it to their advantage.

In any transaction if you know less than the other party, you're at a disadvantage. I was just thinking this morning I could've negotiated a much higher comp for my current job if I knew just some of things about the company I know now.

There are explicit insider trading forms such as SEC forms 3, 4, and 5. Insiders are allowed to trade as long as it is declared to the government. The issue is with trading while having material non public information. Frequently trades are executed on an explicit schedule with rule 10b5-1 to act as a defense against accusations of trading on MNPI.

Really stretching the language to make it meaningless. Changing a job is now insider trading? While there's no actual trading of anything? No shares being bought or sold. No insider information being leaked out.

I’ve done some “insider trading” that I don’t know if was illegal or not.

I was in an aisle seat on a plane and the person up one row on the other aisle was the CEO of a small public company typing or reading their upcoming quarterly report in Word on their laptop.

Headline is misleading. It does not talk about trading securities at all. Not worth a read if you actually were interested in the headline.

Better headline: Using Insider Information to Advance (Save?) Your Career.

Also see the famous case of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Mustaine

who left Metallica to found Megadeth.

How many people think this way, jump ship, and end up being wrong?

Good article. I feel this way about my job :/

I read the article and I’m far more interested in talking about actual legal insider trading in the equities market

You may not be able to trade your company’s stock, or a competitor’s if you have knowledge that was under an employer agreement, but you can trade your sector and correlated assets

You can have an edge, it’s not a legal issue.

https://pelositracker.app/

https://www.quiverquant.com/strategies/s/Congress%20Long-Sho...

Unfortunately doesn't work that smoothly everywhere because outcomes are often tied to larger unknowns whether it is will AI bubble pop or will the global economy take a dip.

Access to internal data isn't a crystal ball

On the flip side, even if the company is on the way up and you're on some team that's at the center of it and you'll never benefit from it if your manager doesn't like you. All the opportunity to do all the things that lead toward career growth and compensation will go to other people.

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