The fourth chapter in Business Adventures by John Brooks is all about insider trading (read my reviews on chapters 1, 2, & 3).
The story is an interesting one though because the character who John focuses on is the driller. The technician doing the drilling and the near immediate speculating that after the first drilling that found evidence of the ore he was looking for went out and bought a bunch of shares of the company. One drilling is certainly no proof… yet this guy was ultimately found guilty of insider trading. What’s interesting though is the deep recounting of whom piled onto the insider information and when.
This is a tough one, for him the investment was insider trading, yet if he had shared the information publicly. If every retail investor was sent a letter with their findings from the single drilling, most people, certainly greater than 90% of people would have no idea what to make of it and would truly be speculating. This one guy’s profession though made him particularly keen at understanding the probability that he was going to be right and this difference is crucial.
What I don’t understand though, is why isn’t the company simply giving him a huge bonus of stock options for the find and let him get filthy rich the legal way for making the discovery?