Earlier this year, as part of my 401K, I sold some of my investment in my company's stock (total value ~$2000). A couple of weeks later, my company released a press release that said that they would be restating earnings due to accounting irregularities. I'm now on the list being questioned about insider trading. Do I need my own lawyer? [more inside]
posted by anonymous on Jul 14, 2008 - 14 answers

The UK based company I don't work for is not a fairly large online financial information provider. Understandably we receive no traffic at all from Google and other search engines for searches related to various company names. Recently I discovered that we catalogue all the search terms by which people reach our site and do a WHOIS search on their IP address using public WHOIS servers. We then search this information for things like "users from ms.com searching for takeover and at least one other word." Then we buy shares in whatever company people from ms.com are looking for along with takeovers. We have no relationship with any of the companies involved other than that we get to see their search terms. So far there is a definite correlation between these things, and we have made money. Could this qualify as insider trading? We are exploiting non publically available information that's for sure.
posted by anonymous on Jun 22, 2006 - 14 answers