>illicitly obtained
No such stipulation. I'm not allowed to trade my company's stock based on information I acquire through performing my standard everyday job duties.
No such stipulation. I'm not allowed to trade my company's stock based on information I acquire through performing my standard everyday job duties.
On its own, material and nonpublic information is fine to trade with. Likewise not all insider trading is illegal; most of it is explicitly legal and mundane.
Nonpublic information about, say, a merger, would be "illicit" in my understanding. But what if you have worked for a company for 10 years and you think management is really great?
You can be guilty of insider trading for not buying something that you'd otherwise have done, too. So if you worked for a company and found it a terrible place to work and therefore never bought company stock, or sold the stock you had, you would in fact have profited from material nonpublic knowledge. Obviously that can't generally be a crime.
This is exactly why they say material non-public information. This is not material. It is your opinion, and you can trade on it during applicable trading windows.
My public company has trading blackout windows close to earnings reports forbidding everyone from trading, non-public information or not. Outside those, you’re still not allowed to trade if you are in possession of material non-public information. If you are an executive, that basically means all the time which is why they’re required to file scheduled sales long in advance. It doesn’t matter if you “do not use it” for your trades — that’s not going to hold up with the SEC.
> You can be guilty of insider trading for not buying something that you'd otherwise have done, too.
This doesn’t sound legitimate.