Yesterday afternoon, former Primary Global consultant Walter Shimoon pleaded guilty to passing inside information to his hedge fund clients. According to court documents, Kingdom Ridge Capital made about $560,000 in October 2009, based on Shimoon's tips about Apple. We now know that the expert network analysts' material non-public information was about the iPhone 4 and the iPad, though at the time, in the case of the latter product, Shimoon struggled to explain what he was talking about. Here's how he described the iPad, which had not yet been unveiled, to Kingdom:
"They [Apple] have a code name for something new ... It's ... It's totally ... It's a new category altogether... It doesn't have a camera, what I figured out. So I speculated that it's probably a reader. ... Something like that. Um, let me tell you, it's a very secretive program ... It's called K, K48. That's the internal name. So, you can get, at Apple you can get fired for saying K48." T
Wiretap: The Apple secrets that Walter Shimoon sold [Fortune]
Tenth Expert-Network Guilty Plea Produces Allegation Against Hedge Fund [FINalternatives]
