Three Twilio developers charged with insider trading

Some might wish they could go back to the onset of the pandemic and invest in online communication tools. The problem for three software developers facing charges of insider trading is that they worked for one of these companies. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said on Monday that the three engineers were …

[Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells]

Does this really need saying:

If you're going to commit a crime, don't document it.

[Falmari]

True, but maybe they might not of thought they were committing a crime.

This seems to be a crime because of the timing of their actions.

"It is alleged the developers, as employees, agreed to keep such information confidential and were subject to a "black out policy," which prohibited trading for insiders during specific windows of time in the financial reporting cycle."

If they had done it outside of the "financial reporting cycle" it may not be a crime. If they did not access the end of year Financial Report before it was released have they committed the crime of Insider trading?

One place I worked (UK but US listed company) we used to get told end of year Financial Report before it was released but we were not allowed to impart that information to anyone, or act on it ourselves before the report was released as it would be Insider trading.

If they were not privy and have not accessed the Financial Report before it was released have they committed insider trading?

[Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells]

I'm not an expert but I'm fairly sure that trading based on any insider knowledge that an outsider wouldn't have access to ( such as in this case the contents of the database ) is illegal.

Such as if you know there's a big scandal coming, shorting the company or dumping your stock would be illegal. I think.

[Anonymous Coward]

Profitable development

As a kid I learned that when Banks started to use computing to track accounts and calculate interest, a software developer wrote code to calculate all the monthly interest payments. When the account interest payment was a third of a pound, he made the bank deposited 33 pence in the customers account and moved 0.3333 pence to his account ... he was caught when they discovered that he had become incredibly wealthy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Profitable development

Someone's been watching Superman 3

[Peter Mount]

Re: Profitable development

That was part of the plot line for one of the Superman movies with Richard Pryor doing exactly that

[Pierre 1970]

Re: Profitable development

I'll prefer the plot of "Office Space" specially the part that they made a mistake with dot and commas (as far as I remember)

[Anonymous Coward]

The engineers do all of the work, the investors and execs get all of the profit… the system we have right now isn’t exactly stable.

[Tom 38]

When you read these insider trading reports, you immediately think "well of course they got caught, they were incredibly stupid". However, not everyone is as stupid as this, so I'm wondering how many people actually get away with this.

[Doctor Syntax]

I also wonder whether they needed to look at sales databases or whatever to work out that what was happening would increase the sales of the business.

[Mobster]

If only they were US senators or House Members, only those 2 classes are allowed insider trading!