Remember how insider trading is trading on material nonpublic information? Only how it’s not? Apparently it is in England! Someone found that out today.

I know, I’m soft on insider trading but hear me out. This is actually kind of screwed up.

First, a story. I used to work in a business that raised money for companies. Often when companies needed to raise money it was to do things like stave off rapidly impending doom, and the company would come to its bankers and ask “so, um, how’s that story going to play in the market?” And you’d answer something like “I don’t know but probably shitty?” And a way to make everyone feel better was a wall-crossed deal, in which the bank calls a few big potential buyers and says “would you buy this thing? at what price?” with the goal being to get the deal mostly done without freaking out the market – or, if that failed, to cancel the deal and move on to plan B also without freaking out the market.

Now in order to do this you needed to “wall cross” the potential investors by getting them to agree not to talk about the offering, or trade in the company’s stock, until the offering became public or was abandoned. Why? Two reasons:
(1) A thing called Regulation FD makes it illegal for companies to tell some investors material things unless they either disclose it to everyone or get the investors to agree to keep it confidential and not trade on it.
(2) Also important! You did this whole wall-cross to avoid announcing your deal and freaking everybody out so they sell your stock. If you don’t get investors to agree not to trade, then they’ll probably sell your stock, so you’ve accomplished nothing except breaking the law a bit.

Now getting them to agree not to trade has a certain chicken-and-egg quality because getting a call from a bank saying “we need to lock you up on company X” is never a good sign (maybe rare exceptions). So the call would go like this: Read more »