For the best experience on desktop, install the Chrome extension to track your reading on news.ycombinator.com
Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | history | paulpauper's commentsregister

you can say you just felt like making a trade, or that you read one of Trump's posts the moment he put it up on Truth Social and you just happened to have the trade ready to go.

An employee with access to Truth Social's backend can in theory do this by reading the tweets he's writing before he sends them.


Anyone can profit from an information asymmetry or mispriced markets--not just insiders with connections. If you are willing do do enough research you can in theory gain such an advantage. This is what some hedge funds do.

Insider trading exists with stocks too. I mean, if there is a way for people to profit by bending the rules or information asymmetry, someone will find a way.

and then spoofing. Creating fake trades to entice copycats.

couldn't you somehow in theory track the order book to if and when insiders are betting and then copy the trade?

For prediction markets you can find out who the insiders are for different categories over time, see for example:

https://x.com/peterjliu/status/2024901585806225723

But there is still the problem of knowing which new trades the insiders made before the bet is settled (maybe solved by being an insider of the prediction market), and also since prediction markets need money on both sides (you are betting against other people, not the 'house') when the insiders make their buy they probably eat up most of or all of the action on the other side.


Not knowing who are the insiders and who is the dumb flow is like the fundamental problem of hft

You can trade on non-public information if you obtain that information unintentionally. Now you have to be able to prove it’s unintentional if the question came up. A real experience example of this is if you work in an office building and your neighboring company, a public company, is being raided by the FBI. Can you use that information to take a position in the market? Yes, according to multiple attorneys we spoke with.

I bring this up because we assume the trading is coming from insiders but I wonder if the parties behind this have baked in a layer similar to my story above.

To close this back to your comment, and I don’t have an answer here: is knowing who the insiders are and acting on that a crime? If you did know and didn’t report them, are you breaking a law? Or worse, you reported it to the deaf ears of a regulator that are focused elsewhere or are under resourced to respond now?


intentionally/unintentionally is not relevant.

it's legal to follow FBI cars and see who they raid so as to make trades. you could even have a hedge fund specialized on this. it's called alternative data

you can even be a regular employer of a public company and trade based on information sent on internal emails.

the only thing illegal is to be a designated insider - typically a restricted group of people with access to sensitive information


> you can even be a regular employer of a public company and trade based on information sent on internal emails

You absolutely cannot.


"cannot" here meaning it's likely to be prosecuted, not that you cannot. You absolutely can.

This interpretation is incredibly unlikely. The first and third paragraphs discuss legality, but the middle one was merely talking about likelihood of prosecution?

Even then it would be inaccurate: the regulators are not too stupid to put two and two together that you work for a company and got incredibly lucky with your trade


To be clear, I was responding about trading on internal communications, not specifically a raid. The practice of using internal communication to guide trading runs contrary to most company policies. I happen to have worked at a company where this kind of practice was both acknowledged and openly discussed. It was a strange place.

> the regulators are not too stupid to put two and two together that you work for a company and got incredibly lucky with your trade

You’re implying some specific combination of factors, but it’s not clear what you mean. What qualifies as "timing"? Around earnings, when trading volume is highest or just around some event? And what exactly counts as "lucky"?

Why would regulators scrutinize a sub-$25k purchase of my own company’s stock? That concern feels overstated. Granted, I’m not a lawyer. In practice I can place a trade at any time. If someone is routinely making $20k–$30k transactions, that alone is unlikely to trigger scrutiny.

The claim that you "absolutely cannot do this" is simply incorrect. I stand by that.


Looks like you're one of today's lucky 10,000* to learn that insider trading is very much illegal!

Here's a few examples: https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/insidertrading/cases.shtml

Some further advice on the matter: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-08-12/the-10-la...

10 Laws of Insider Trading

1. Don’t do it.

2. Don’t do it by buying short-dated out-of-the-money call options on merger targets.

3. Don’t text or email about it.

4. Don’t do it in your mother’s account.

5. Don’t do it by planting bombs at a company and shorting its stock.

6. Don’t do it while employed at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

7. Don’t Google “how to insider trade without getting caught” before doing it.

8. If you didn’t insider trade, don’t forget and accidentally confess to insider trading.

9. If you are going to insider trade, do it in a company that is far away from a Securities and Exchange Commission office. Like, physically.

10. If you are already under a federal ethics investigation about your ownership or promotion of a stock, don’t insider trade that stock.

* https://m.xkcd.com/1053/


> If someone is routinely making $20k–$30k transactions, that alone is unlikely to trigger scrutiny

If they never make money, you’re fine. If they make a lot of money, it will get flagged ex post facto. Regulators then check if you or your family have any affiliations with the issuer; if they do, it’s flagged further. All of this typically happens automatically after companies’ stock prices move significantly.


How is there enough volume to cover the other side of the bet with these minutes-before trades?

The oil market is, to put it mildly, fucking huge

> oil market is, to put it mildly, fucking huge

Sure. But these aren't trades in "the oil market." They're bets on Polymarket and a specific oil-futures exchange.


Are you implying that there is arbitrage between the prediction market and the real market? Until now we were assuming that the prediction market is self-contained, with its other side staying within the confines of the prediction market.

the other side can and many times is an arbitrageour which has positions in both the prediction market and the real market

For sure, the real trading markets are huge. I mean the betting platforms.

the betting markets offset positions with the real markets. it's all connected

> betting markets offset positions with the real markets

Need a strong source for this. The size (and regulatory) disconnect between the two would seem to make making markets in both a bit silly.


insiders would presumably be bigger trades that show high conviction about improbable events. An insider would wait until the last minute to take advantage of low prices of a market close to expiration.

In theory that is part of what was supposed to have been solved by CAT.

What is CAT?

8gb of ram far too little. My 5-year-old old laptop that I still use came with 16gb, so you're buying obsolete tech already.

I've got the 8GB M1 Air. It works fine for me memory wise.

In some ways the Neo looks better than the Air for things I have had problems with in that it looks easier to replace bits - my battery and speakers are both kind of knackered.


I think the people who buy the MacBook Neo don't care.

MacBook Air has double the RAM but is nearly double (>1.8x) the price.

Flash storage and memory compression mean that you can do pretty well running a single app at a time.


I think it’s too little for this day and age as well, but in Apple’s defense, their RAM compression on ARM works amazingly well and performs similarly to 12GB on Windows.

With that said, I hate that you can’t upgrade the RAM or storage.

I hope that at least one side effect of this is that developers will have a business case for performance improvement dev time, as those machines will become a juicy target, similar to video game consoles that may not have the best specs but are consistent and have a large number of units in the market.


This is the way. There is huge survivorship bias when it comes to start-ups, even AI start-ups. When it comes to wealth creation, it's hard to beat a 20-30% CAGR with big tech stocks since 2010 or so, which was doable.

Isn't passive income a cornerstone of of the Rich Dad Poor Dad Books? This long predates 2020. I would say selling masks and only being $800 in the hole is a lot better than starting a "regular business" and down $80k-800k.

My memory of RDPD was that it preaches getting assets which generate income, not that your management of those assets would be passive. Though obviously it also did have a subtext of "scale some kind of assets that generate income to a certain point and you can pay someone else to do more of the grunt work while you look into a new opportunity."

Yes, it was the exact same scheme. Rich Dad Poor Dad was basically "Buy lots of cheap, crappy houses and become a slum lord" expanded into thousands of pages of books, seminars, and self help guides.

and Kiyosaki has declared bankruptcy at least once!

There really should be a special category for business books written by people who’ve gone bankrupt. I know at least two well known examples, but there’s got to be a whole lot more.

Dave Ramsey went bankrupt but to be fair he incorporates it into his teaching.

“Hear are the things that led me to bankruptcy, and here are the things I did to climb out of it and become financially stable again.”


You’re right. Books like the Four Hour Workweek and Escape From Cubicle Nation were guides to passive income twenty years ago.

It’s not totally risk-free income (but what is) but a decent pile invested sensibly makes for pretty good passive income depending on your goals.

now where do you get that pile to invest? I have a pile invested - but I'm close to retirement and it took me many years to save it up.

By working and investing. More successfully at some points than others. But you’re totally right that different people are better set up and more or less inclined to move on from a job than others.

The larger message is young people cannot get passive income in a short time. Sure there are a few born rich, and a tiny handful who by luck and skill (both are needed) get rich quick. However for the vast majority passive income is a long slog of saving a little here and there. (there is a third option - really lower your standard of living so you need almost nothing to live - get a good job but live in a tent city with the poor, cooking on a camp stove - everything you own fits in a backpack). The idea that you can in a few years get enough invested to live on a beach for the rest of your life is a fantasy that sells books but doesn't otherwise exist.

I agree with all that. I've known a couple of people (at least one was out of investment banking--think both were) who pretty much fully retired in their forties, which of course isn't really that young. Some people hit the startup or some other lottery early on and, even if you get a million dropped on you at 25 or 30, you should probably think long and hard about whether you can really just not work any longer. Gives you a lot of breathing room but isn't really a huge pile.

Certainly, there are degrees of frugality. I could probably spend more than I do but don't have a real interest in doing so and generally avoid expensive things that might give me some incremental pleasure but prefer to arrange things so that increment is pretty small and doesn't revolve around "stuff."


> Sure there are a few born rich

A LOT of Millenials were born rich. They may not have realized it, but now that boomers are dying off, it is stratifying Millennials through inheritance.

A lot of them have and continue to receive massive wealth transfers from their boomer parents through free-ish rent, gifts (aka pay for your down payment on a house), etc, etc.


Hard to keep up with what generations are supposedly uniquely disadvantaged. For Millennials specifically, houses would seem to be rather late in the game as they're probably mostly buying in their 30s maybe if they're buying at all and probably haven't been living with their parents for most of that period before.

That is a nice windfall but most are not getting enough to retire early on.

I've been hearing about "passive income" for at least the last 10 years, and I reckon it goes back further than that.

The Chicago School would probably hate it

The "economy on a chip" thought experiment .

Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search:

HN For You