Matt Levine, Columnist

Trading Ahead of the News

Also Tesla, robots and fraudulent emails.

June 19, 2018 at 3:19 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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Wilbur Ross!

Here’s an insider-trading hypothetical for you. Let’s say you are a prominent government official and a billionaire, and you own stock in a shady company. A reporter calls you up and says “hey I am working on a story about how you own stock in a shady company, care to comment?” You say “I’ll get right back to you,” hang up, dump your stock, and short the company. Eventually the reporter publishes the story, which details how shady the company is and implies that it is nefariously connected to prominent government officials. The stock drops. And you’re like “hahaha got you, actually I was short that company,” and you collect your profits.