In all seriousness, I have little faith that our SEC would be able to make a case against a terrorist who did anything more "sneaky" than open an account a week before the incident make a six-figure trade, and close the account.
I'm not saying that it would be hard to make a case, I'm saying that our SEC isn't up to it. How many cases worth more than $100,000 or so -- real cases, not 15-year-olds or blatant penny-stock fraud -- of insider trading and option scams has the SEC brought during the entire mania? Less than a dozen, I'm certain of that, and if I were betting money, I'd bet on less than five. And I think only one or two of those required more investigative know-how than simply finding the list of employees.
Most of us here are familiar with Fleck's tales of de facto market manipulation on market swoons via the standard practice of massive selling of put options.
And on the Micron thread back in '98 and '99, for another example, we saw so many expiration-week examples of multi-thousand out-of-the-money call option buys immediately preceding a huge upgrade that we talked about nominating the "SEC Contact of the Month" to complain about it.
In these cases, not a thing was ever done. In the first case, "We were selling those calls for a client, it's just a coincidence that the market maker had to buy stock to stabilize the price" ended any discussion, per Fleck. In the second case we simply never heard anything from the SEC, directly or indirectly. |
