Matt Levine, Columnist

The SEC Isn't OK With Spouses Who Eavesdrop

People who are in a marriage and overhear merger news as part of their marriage can't trade on it.

December 21, 2018 at 12:00 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.

This isn't just a matter of insider trading law.
Photographer: Keystone Features/Hulton Archive

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This post originally appeared in Money Stuff.

I worry a little that I have been a little too successful in convincing people that “insider trading is not about fairness, it’s about theft.” (And also not successful enough in convincing people that nothing in this column is legal advice.) We talked yesterday about a guy named Peter Cho, who settled insider trading charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission after he overheard his investment-banker fiancée talking about a deal at their apartment and bought short-dated call options on the target’s stock. Several people emailed or tweeted to say: Wait, I thought trading on material nonpublic information that you overhear is just fine?