SEC plans to go after market manipulation on social media, executive insider trading, Gensler says
Chris Matthews, 07 June 2021
Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler said Monday that his agency is focused on adopting new rules to guard against company executives using private information to opportunistically sell shares of companies they oversee, while acknowledging that the SEC must come up with new strategies to guard against market manipulation on social media.
The SEC adopted regulations about 20 years ago, called 10b5-1 plans, that enable company insiders to buy and sell securities in their own company if those transactions are made by a third party who is not aware of material, non-public information.
“In my view, these plans have led to real cracks in our insider trading regime,” Gensler said at the Wall Street Journal’s CFO Network Summit Monday.
One concern Gensler has is that there is no “cooling off period” mandated by the SEC for when a 10b5-1 plan is adopted and when it can start trading, though research shows that 40% of such plans begin trading within just two months after they are opened, while 14% start trading within a month.
Futhermore, there is no limitation as to how many 10b5-1 plans insiders can open, making it easier for an insider to shut down one or many plans if he has public information that suggests that it would be profitable to do so.
“Insiders can cancel a plan when they do have material non-public information. This seems upside-down to me. It also may undermine investor confidence,” Gensler said. “In my view, canceling a plan may be as economically significant as carrying out an actual transaction,” he added. “Thus, I’ve asked staff to consider limitations on when and how plans can be canceled.”
Supporters of a new cryptocurrency named “StopElon” on Sunday protested outside Tesla Inc.’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) Fremont factory over CEO Elon Musk’s involvement in the cryptocurrency market, according to a report by NBC Bay Area News.
Two South Australian MPs have called for a royal commission into the operations of the Adelaide casino similar to those underway into Crown in Victoria and Western Australia.
AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc AMC 0.16% jumped another 10% on Monday, and the hashtag #NakedShorting was trended on Twitter in the process.
Stocks finished mixed on Monday with the S&P 500 failing to make a run for a new record and closing slightly in the red. The index is already up about 12% year-to-date, but investors are feeling a bit skittish about inflation.
You might not have heard of it before, or even know what it is, but “cuckoo Smurfing” is a sneaky way organised criminals engage in money laundering, by exploiting the legitimate bank accounts of individuals and businesses in Australia.
SYDNEY (Reuters) – National Australia Bank said on Monday it is under investigation for suspected serious and ongoing breaches of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism laws, sparking concerns about potential fines and higher compliance costs.
PARIS: France has opened a probe into the personal wealth of Riad Salameh, central bank chief in crisis-hit Lebanon, sources told AFP Sunday.
The Group of Seven nations targeted environmental crimes with a move to push companies into disclosing the impact they have on the climate.
In just two months last year, the FBI watched three companies pay hackers wielding ransomware called NetWalker millions in Bitcoin to get their hacked data back. While that seems like a big win for the cybercriminals, it also gave investigators in the U.S. and elsewhere a new roadmap for tracking and prosecuting them.
AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc AMC 6.51% held on to its weekly gains in early afternoon trading on Friday after a sharp pullback in Thursday’s session.
Biblical cycle expert and financial analyst Bo Polny predicted in November of 2020 the stock market (DOW) would “top out in May 2021 at around 33,000 to 34,000 and then crash in June.” So far, half of the prediction is spot on, and we are waiting for the crash. Polny says, “The greatest financial event in human history is not and will not happen on a Trump watch. I repeat, the greatest financial event in human history is not going down on a Trump watch. It’s going to go down under the current, whatever you want to call him. Trump is a builder. The builder comes in to fix things.”
A longtime bookkeeper and office manager at a family-owned tree nursery in North Carolina has pleaded guilty to stealing upwards of $1 million from his employer over six years, according to the federal government.
The rise of the “meme stocks” has been a fascinating adventure with the combination of ubiquitous technology and the ability to drive trading by retail investors in a way that has never been experienced before. While a certain amount of manipulation of markets has always existed, the recent advent of trading forums, like Wallstreetbets on Reddit, and other digital communication methods, has shifted some of the influence away from big money to smaller investors pooling resources.