, Columnist
Don’t Insider Trade NFTs
Also Melvin Capital, Tiger Global, Archegos and a fake game show from the SEC.
Programming note: Money Stuff will be off tomorrow, back on Monday.
A famous fact of US securities law is that there is no law against insider trading. What there is is a law against securities fraud: It is illegal “to employ any device, scheme, or artifice to defraud” someone in connection with a securities trade.1 For a long time courts have interpreted that to include insider trading, and there is a Securities and Exchange Commission rule clarifying that in fact insider trading counts as a scheme or artifice to defraud. But there is no law against insider trading specifically; instead, insider trading is a type of fraud.