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Comment by slavboj | Hacker News Reader

For one, you can assume that data will be compromised and exfiltrated.

Especially if you are a blogger or journalist who writes an article dissing the SEC's commissioners. (Or a corporation with "good relations" to certain SEC employees. The corruption possibilities are endless.)

And yes, there's recent precedent of federal market regulators abusing their power to help corporate friends. Feel free to look up the predict.it/Kashi situation, if you have any doubt.

Real estate holdings are public, why would it matter if public security holdings were public as well?

(my portfolio was previously reported for compliance purposes to my financial services employer, and trades required pre-approval and ongoing portfolio monitoring)

They're not public, they're available covertly to people with access to the database. How much would you pay to duplicate, say, Paul Pelosi's trades? How about getting a notice whenever someone acquires just short of the threshold amount that requires an SEC filing for a merger target?

Ideally, the Pelosi family trading history would already be public information as with all congressional trades.

Controversial take, but IMHO a person's right to privacy should exist regardless of their spouse's employment.

Instead, I'd rather prefer that corporations and governments would be forced to act in the open.

Controversial take, but if the public is paying your salary to represent them, both you and your spouse should be under greater scrutiny so they know whose interests you're really representing.

The need to disclose spousal information may dissuade some (maybe many) from public service, but that doesn't necessarily seem like a bad thing.

Punish corruption, violations of transparency laws and not disclosing lobbying contacts in public by a 10 year minimum prison sentence for involved persons and a 50% worldwide income fine of the parent company for involved companies, and provide a bounty of 10 million dollars + 20% of the fines levied and complete immunity for whistleblowers...

It's a matter of incentives in the end, I prefer adjusting these over complicated bullshit regarding "insider" trading rules that's constantly gamed anyway because it has no real teeth attached.

I would not pay for any of what you mention. I would simply like the information be reported and publicly available with enough latency to ensure theta decay kills any value from the trade information being made public. A delayed immutable public ledger of public securities transactions if you will.

If you want to see my baskets of index funds, have at it.

Does the SEC have a history of data breaches? I'd be more worried about the IRS which already has much of this information since their computing infrastructure is already known to be archaic and in need of updating.

Data breaches are not a matter of if, but when. Government agencies are not gifted with special competency at avoiding this.

The OPM didn't (though they had been warned they weren't doing things well), but then they did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...

The amount of damage that can be done by a breach of a large trove of sensitive data is quite impressive.

Ah yes, unlike private companies and their sterling record of protecting sensitive information!

Duplicating every single record into the same place is a massive increase in attack surface and payoff for an attacker.

"information wants to be free"

And so what? Secret ownership of corporations is a blight upon the world.

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