Matt Levine, Columnist

Insider Trader Had All the Answers

Also secret friendships, ad hoc bondholder groups, tweeting material news, Mango Markets and securities fraud settlements are securities fraud.

October 1, 2024 at 6:31 PM UTC

By Matt Levine

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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The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, which is yesterday. Unlike many financial industry employees, SEC employees do not, as far as I know, actually receive annual bonuses based on how much revenue (fines) they bring in in a fiscal year. Nevertheless they keep busy in September. We talked last year about a paper by Dain C. Donelson, Matthew Kubic and Sara Toynbee — published this year in the Journal of Accounting and Economics — about “the SEC’s September spike,” finding that “SEC staff respond to performance-reporting pressures and file more enforcement actions in September, the final month of the SEC's fiscal year, than in any other month.”

Anyway here is the SEC’s feed of enforcement news. A lot of US securities law got made in the last week. There are 17 items from yesterday, 21 from Friday, 13 from Thursday, etc. Let’s talk about a few of them.