Matt Levine, Columnist

Data Breaches and Last Looks

Also cans of worms, whistle-blowers, the debt ceiling and blockchain shirts.

September 8, 2017 at 1:21 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Insider trading.

Yesterday evening Bloomberg News reported that "three Equifax Inc. senior executives sold shares worth almost $1.8 million in the days after the company discovered a security breach that may have compromised information on about 143 million U.S. consumers," and over a month before it disclosed that breach. About 15 people tweeted that story at me, with some asking if it justifies a new Eighth Law of Insider Trading. No? What would it be? Like, "if you are an officer of a company, and you discover material bad news, don't trade on that news before disclosing it to your shareholders"? That's just the First Law of Insider Trading, which is: Don't do it.