It may well be that the 'early' trader knew they weren't the only one with early access to the data and intentionally set their trades to be a tiny bit early, to increase their chances of getting out ahead of the people who schedule their trades for just-after the scheduled announcement.
Which may well indicate a larger problem than one guy with a tip.
I mean, I know that traders are probably pretty anal about accurate clocks, but mistakes do happen.
Absolutely. I'm just saying there isn't much justification to assume it was a mere mistake.
Particularly given the trades that show up just after the report was released, but before a person could conceivably process them and initiate the relevant strategy.
That alone suggests gamesmanship, even if the "early" trader went earlier than he meant to.
Couldn't they be trading based on some natural language processing algorithm?