It's entirely plausible he was crooked, but he also claimed the NSA backed out of a deal with Qwest and then the insider trading charges showed up after he refused to comply with their (illegal) requests to spy on their customers.
Read the charge sheet [1]. Is it possible that the NSA walked over to the SEC and asked them to prioritise this? Sure, why not. Is it also pretty clear cut that he insider traded? Yes.
Read through Tesla’s history with the SEC, specifically Musk being immature and committing securities fraud on Twitter. They’ve fined him and the company, and there is no love lost between the two, but TSLA is still going up.
The twitter outrage over elon's comments are nothing more than a woefully uninformed public hoping to remove the tip without addressing the iceburg underneath.
If every one of your competition doesn't have to play by the rules, you'll find it hard to beat them playing honestly and you'll find that over time the only winners left are the cheaters.
- flow internalization which reduces liquidity on venues and widens spreads
- dark pools which is liquidity only available to institutions, therefore removing liquidity from venues that retail trades on
- market fragmentation which harms retail investors who don't have the execution sophistication of HFT or execution algos
- short sale restriction which harms retail traders who incur excess slippage
- allowing market makers to naked short sell but not retail investors which harms retail investors because they have to pay rents to access it
- trading halts which benefit institutions (over retail) who have the execution sophistication to handle unhalts and who can price warrants etc better while the product is halted
This is problematic not just because of the violations of those customers' rights, but also because it creates perverse incentives for the government to encourage the success of dirty tech companies as means to circumvent constitutional protections.
Thus while I don't doubt Nacchio's guilt, I absolutely think that he should have atleast been allowed to use that argument as a defense in his court case so that the Government is somewhat discouraged from using such tactics by the knowledge that it can come to light in court.
I do too. We just have no evidence this happened.
Any evidence regarding that was suppressed by the judge due to the possible revealing of classified information. This sort of suppression is precisely my objection as it effectively allows the government to operate with impunity.
I don't claim to know if the claims were true, I just think they should have been assessed in court.