Matt Levine, Columnist

Fake Cancer Doctor Insider Trading

Also a Kelly Services poison pill and betting on roosters.

January 13, 2026 at 7:10 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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Some insider trading hypotheticals. Let’s say you have cancer. A publicly traded biotech company has a promising drug in development to treat your cancer. It is conducting clinical trials of this drug. Your doctor suggests that you should try to sign up for the trial. You do. The drug works and your cancer is cured. The company has not yet released the results of the trial. You have a data point — your own experience — and you think the drug is great. You buy some short-dated out-of-the-money call options on the company’s stock. A week later, the company releases the trial results, which are excellent; the drug works. The stock shoots up and you make a ton of money on the call options. Is this illegal insider trading?

Well. A few points: