Andy Bechtolsheim charged with insider trading
Comments
dekhn
jdblair
Ha! I worked on that hardware, or at least, on the software in the service processor (aka, ILOM) in that hardware. I transferred out of the Linux group at Sun (which was being disbanded) and joined the group formally known as Kealia, still in its original office space on Deer Creek Rd in Palo Alto.
Context here: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2665260/sun-buys-server-co...
vundercind
> ZFS merging the logically distinct layers of storage (volume and FS management)
This really weirded me out at first, but now feels so right.
ansible
Back in the day (mid 1990's IIRC), I read one of the NetApp whitepapers on their WAFL (write anywhere file layout), and that's what sold me on merging the storage layers. The Motorola group I was at was transitioning from Auxpex to NetApp around that time.
dekhn
At the time of the ZFS presentation we were trying hard to move off NetApps- we had never-ending problems with WAFL (mainly caused by deleting 5TB from a nearly-full file system combined with snapshots). ZFS and Sun Fire were fairly early in their life cycles at that point so it wasn't "mature" enough for our enterprise use cases.
I still don't like the idea of combinging volume management with filesystem, but it's clear that it's worked well for many people over the past 15 years
doubled112
Once you use ZFS it is hard to go back to anything else because of this.
roygbiv2
Everytime I log into my esxi host I wish the storage used zfs. I know proxmox does and I'll probably head that way eventually.
doubled112
I use Proxmox at home because it has ZFS and built in backups. That was enough of a selling point for me.
ESXi and VSphere not having backups built in feels like classic "create the problem, sell the solution" to me.
roygbiv2
PCI passthrough just works on esxi, couple of clicks done. Seems a little more involved in proxmox.
doubled112
You are correct.
Linux will try to grab and use every piece of hardware you have installed, so you have to whitelist/ignore things
I didn't find it too bad, but I haven't passed hardware to a VM in a number of years
jgtrosh
Saw Andy at one conf, I confirm he was wayy into minutiae. Geekiest presentation technical in a supposedly not-too-technical panel. But, not related to the insider trading.
spxneo
I know this is off-topic but may I ask what type of Ferrari was it? 360 spider? That's quite the scene you describe, imagine all the people who felt inspired/disgusted by the car. It's straight out of a movie.
dekhn
TBH I can't recall. I tried to find some references but only to the silver Porsche 944.
JKCalhoun
Or out of Silicon Valley (the series).
michaelcampbell
> (other than whyyyyyy?
Really? Money, and the thought they wouldn't get caught.
JKCalhoun
Already has plenty of money I assume, no one ever thinks they're going to get caught. I don't know him but from the people in this thread that do, it sounds like he should have known better.
michaelcampbell
> Already has plenty of money I assume,
That's beside the point. What's one thing almost all people with more money than they need, want? more.
zokier
I'm sure SEC has done their homework and knows what they are doing, but to me this is not that clear-cut case. Bechtolsheim heard a rumour that Acacia had gotten offer and traded based on that. But my reading is that to him it was just a rumour, he didn't know for certain that the deal was happening or what the terms of the deal were. Of course as a senior executive he should have known better, but still to me this is not the most heinous crime and closer to just a lapse of judgement.
not2b
Read it again. He didn't hear a "rumor". He got it direct from a manager involved in the acquisition. Nothing in business is certain, but he knew that the acquisition was highly likely. Then he used the account of a relative (doesn't say he tipped off the relative, says he used the account), to hide his involvement most likely. If the SEC didn't have a strong case he wouldn't have settled so quickly.
rKarpinski
> If the SEC didn't have a strong case he wouldn't have settled so quickly.
No one wants to fight the federal government wether they are guilty or not.
"Forbes lists Bechtolsheim's net worth at somewhere north of $16 billion. The SEC fine is less than 0.006 percent of his holdings."
I'd settle immediately too. 900k fine or 400k illicit gains means nothing if you are worth 16B.
kirubakaran
"I'd settle immediately too. 900k fine or 400k illicit gains means nothing if you are worth 16B."
> [Andy] has also agreed to be barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for five years
Do you think that means nothing?
rKarpinski
> Do you think that means nothing?
It means nothing. He's 68 years old and worth 16B.
The book "Den Of Thieves" (also about insider trading) makes a good case for why you don't want to fight the federal government, even when you can.
toyg
You don't need to be a director to make money. He's not barred from being an investor.
StefanBatory
For five years that feels like nothing major, in fact. He can still use his connections and return after that time, not there but somewhere for sure.
godelski
> Do you think that means nothing?
Yes.
Even as other commenters have pointed out his age, let's be realistic at what $1B is (let alone 16!)
Suppose you have an interest rate of 5% over the year. That's a pretty safe level and I'm sure he gets more. That means you're getting $50m for doing nothing (passive income), or just under $137k/day (overly simplified calculation based on yearly return divided by 365. No compounding, so consider lower bound). Try spending that much money a day! Then consider trying to spend that much money AFTER you've already bought a few nice homes, cars, and hell throw in a private jet (cheap is a few million, most are 10-20, and Elon's is $78M[0]). (At 16B, you're closer to $800m/yr or $2.19m/day!!!! $900k in fines isn't even half a day's "sitting on his ass doing nothing" for him, let alone work. [1])
The thing that often baffles me is why these people still work. You can do almost anything you want with that kind of money. But I think this also says something about money, power, and how these people think. It also makes me wonder why people get mad at tech workers with our high salaries (definitely not complaining!).
Maybe I just don't understand business (I'm a researcher, not a MBA, so assume this is correct). But I just don't see how these salaries do anything for these people other than be a high score. The only way I can personally think of spending $10m in a year is by buying a house and I can't imagine wanting more than 2 (and even a $10m house is often too big! In most locations. Yes, I'm aware SF exists).
I just wonder, can't you undercut everyone by taking a lower salary? Which would increase the company value? Or stop pushing deadlines so fast so there's higher quality? Or many other things because there's a ton of C-suit execs getting these salaries. I just don't understand, why work? I have to imagine, a key part must be addiction. Which I can get, I like a fair amount of work, but would rather take money to work as I see fit (but I guess they get this. But you're not at the technical level and personally (thus, highly biased) I find it is far less fun managing people).
I think there's a real disconnect. In how we see billionaires, how they see us, and how they see themselves. That money is just an insane level. fwiw, I'm not even against billionaires. I just don't understand why once people have $100m they don't pull a Anderson or John Bogle. Because money isn't real anymore.
Edit:
let's add some nice numbers at this 5% rate. If you have $20m invested (earning that 5%) you're going to make $1m/yr for life. $100m gets you $5m/yr and $500m gets you $25m/yr. 10B gets you 500M, and $20B means you're a forever billionaire.
Looking at Forbe's list, we got Bernard Arnault, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Ellison (in order). That's $11.3B/yr ($31m/day), $9.9B/yr ($27.1M/day), $9.9B/yr ($27.1M/day (nearly tied)), $8.6B/yr ($23.7M/day), and $7.75B/yr ($21.2M/day) respectively.
With $7.3B you make the $1M/day, which makes you the 367th richest person in the world.
[0] https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/31983...
[1] (edit add) Let's say that's half a day's work for you and you're a L4 at Google. Using Levels.fyi data, you got a base salary around $178k/yr and so this is equivalent to you dropping $200 ($320 if you include equity) if compared to his passive income alone (which again, is probably >5%). Let that sink in. Technically it is even less than you should value that $200 because he doesn't need to save anything.
[2] If some billionaire wants to drop $50m on me, I'll go live my life reading math books, buy a B200 node (maybe even 2! Or a few more!), and research AGI for the rest of my life. I mean I'll also do that for a lot less too, but hey, that's 2 days of nothing for you Elon or Bezos. I'm sure it is worth more than that in publicity alone. ;)
fragmede
If you spend it on things for yourself, you can't spend that kind of money. But if you use it on other people, it quickly evaporates the more you want to get to do with it.
Let's use $800m/yr or $2.19m/day. If a FAANG-grade employee costs $1mm/yr all in (including benefits, HR, managerial overhead, real estate, etc; that's 800 people, or 66 teams of 12. how many random software projects can you think up, just within the realm of math books, B200 nodes, and AGI? Wouldn't you rather study that with other people than by yourself? And fund all the various possibilities you think will pan out?
Healthcare is another one. You have a sick niece suffering from a rare unknown disease. You could plow hundreds of millions of dollars into researching a cure for her disease.
General philanthropy is another easy way to burn money you don't need. take half that $800mm and donate it to all the charities in your immediate vicinity. every bit of pain in the world you can personally see, just give them a million dollars, no questions asked.
But yeah, if all you want to do is spend it on yourself, it's impossible to see how you'd spend it all, because you can't.
godelski
> If you spend it on things for yourself, you can't spend that kind of money. But if you use it on other people, it quickly evaporates the more you want to get to do with it.
There's a limit though, right? Gates is spending it pretty fast except he isn't. It can be hard to spend millions in a day because it takes time to spend that money and your money makes money in that time. At a large enough wealth, you can't ignore the compounding factor because it plays a significant role. If it were even the 2 days standard transaction, then that 2 days generates you another $4m right? And that $4m generates you another $200k/yr (or ~$500/day).
I ran a simulation, because it helps for framing. Start with 16bn, 5% yearly interest, 0 employees, and let your employee cost $400k/yr (L5). Each weekday, take daily interest, and pay the employee's daily salary. There are 104 weekend days, so we'll pay a daily rate of ~$3.5k (I used exact). If it is a weekend don't pay the employee.
In a year you have 261 employees and have made $767 million dollars. That's a pretty profitable year! Oh, yeah, your employees probably made you money too.
If you're a billionaire and did this, you would have lost $1.6m over that year. With $2bn, you profit just shy of $50m.
> Wouldn't you rather study that with other people than by yourself? And fund all the various possibilities you think will pan out?
Definitely. I got 261 this year and we've made a nice profit without delivering a product. Next year we'll double in size and make the same.
> General philanthropy
The reason to do that simulation is to try to guesstimate these things. MacKenzie Scott is well known to be a huge philanthropist. She's richer now than when she divorced Bezos. Of course, Amazon has done much better than 5% per year. But at the same time, she is trying to throw money away as fast as possible. Also according to Forbes last year she gave away $2bn and so far has given $16.5bn away...
That's someone who's twice as wealthy as the person we're talking about, has given away "one Andy Bechtolsheim" AND profited! This is since 2019 btw.
I really cannot stress how large these numbers are. And how different money is at these sizes, because if you do not consider compounding interest (a thing we can often ignore in our daily lives, even if we were multi-millionaires), you're not accounting for millions of dollars. I'm sure there's a way, but it is effectively impossible to spend $100bn. It takes a whole country to do that. Remember, at the start of the simulation you are paying out $1.5k/day, but at the end you're paying $400k/day. Your compounded rate of spending just can't catch up to your compounding rate of earning. The $2bn person doesn't start losing money until day 710.
fragmede
These numbers truely are large. the best visualization I've seen for that is https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
godelski
Yeah, those are good, but they still treat money as static. And our brains just aren't wired like that. It's very hard to conceptualize because we think numbers like 1bn is close to 2bn due to the aggregation of the 0's but they just aren't.
fragmede
Everyone reading this is closer to being a millionaire than Jeff Besos.
godelski
Of course this is true. He can make over $1m/hr doing nothing
fragmede
Question is, how do I get that job?
ambicapter
I think people just keep on doing the same thing they were doing unless something dramatic happens in their life. He got to that point by doing some sort of work, he's going to keep on doing that sort of work until he dies. So many people get to retirement and...they don't really want to stop. Stopping would mean re-evaluating everything, which can be pretty tough on an older mind. Life expectancy takes a dramatic dip around retirement, the change can be overwhelming for some.
rqtwteye
“The thing that often baffles me is why these people still work. You can do almost anything you want with that kind of money.”
Simple. They love the work. That’s what they want to do. To become a billionaire you usually have to put in an enormous effort. Not many people are willing to do that.
godelski
Fair, I don't think I explained this well. Because even I would "work" (see [2]). But it is a completely different kind of work, not being bound. They can definitely run companies big or small with no concern of investors.
No doubt billionaires work hard to get there. And no doubt it is a hard task.
I guess part of it is why care about how much money you make anymore? If you care about "score" it seems odd to compare your assets when you can compare your companies' value. Because you can't actually do anything with that money in your bank, and the company's value is a more meaningful metric as to your "value." I think Jensen's rise says a lot more about his value than the $80B in assets or him being in the top 20 richest. (golden handcuffs aside) In that respect Jensen is doing much better than Musk or Bezos. Of course there's tons of metrics to consider but just using this to help ground a talking point.
rqtwteye
“ I guess part of it is why care about how much money you make anymore?”
They are good at making money so it’s fun for them.
On an aside I think Jensen is very good at looking folksy but in the end he is another super driven high achiever. He just expresses himself differently. You don’t get to that level if you aren’t a hard nosed business guy.
godelski
I don't think you're understanding what I'm saying. Money in the pocket means nothing. Not even a good value for fictitious scoring. Arguably putting it in your pocket becomes shortsighted because you can make more money by putting it back into the company. Because really, it's doing nothing when you have it because you can't spend it. But if it is in the company then it can be spent. Reducing price of products increases number of sales. You can put it back into employees to make them work harder and be happier (more efficient workers). And so on. But you literally can't spend it if it is in your bank account. We're talking about divested fully liquidated dollars. That's the part I don't get.
DecentRecruiter
Keeping score is still the primary driver.
Wealth and power, it's all relative. And the competition only becomes fiercer as those measures increase (the top performers being the most competitive).
The person with $5B is not thinking in terms of "enough." Their sights are set on surpassing the $6B guy.
rqtwteye
It’s a competition or a hobby. Most hobbies are ultimately meaningless. I used to do boxing. Getting punched in the face and punching others is ultimately useless. But for some reason I enjoyed it and put an enormous effort into it. Others play golf and enjoy it. And billionaires like to make money.
godelski
I don't think you get it. I responded here[0] which motivated a simulation where you hire a $400k employee every weekday. You're hugely profitable if you're a multi-billionaire (>$1bn worth). You effectively cannot spend that money faster than you make it. These are amounts where you have to consider compounding interest because if you don't, you're missing daily profits that are on the scale of what we'd consider the net worth of a very wealthy individual.
JKCalhoun
Wild. It's as though if I were rich enough I could run around robbing banks, just give the money back and a fine if I get caught.
grugagag
A special class of robbers for sure. Some may even call it parasitism and it wouldnt be easy to disagree unless looked at it from an awkward distorted angle where it could look justified..
tptacek
That's not quite true. He was contacted by a manager at a firm that did not buy Acacia, accurately surmised they were in play, and bought in.
purpleblue
Why didn't he get jail time like other insider traders?
xadhominemx
Insider trading is not illegal; providing a material benefit to (paying) someone to provide you inside information and then using that to insider trade is illegal.
There is some ambiguity about the definition of a "material benefit" - does that include friendship? Advice? Soft promises of future business arrangements? I assume the government didn't have a 100% solid angle on that element of the crime.
nyokodo
> Insider trading is not illegal
Trading based on non-public material information is what is meant by Insider Trading and it absolutely is illegal. [1]
1. https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...
maxlybbert
Insider trading requires material nonpublic information, but it also requires somebody violate a fiduciary duty. From the page you linked to (emphasis added):
> Illegal insider trading refers generally to buying or selling a security, in breach of a fiduciary duty or other relationship of trust and confidence, on the basis of material, nonpublic information about the security.
fragmede
> or other relationship of trust and confidence
It seems the SEC is going after him with the latter clause. His long time business contact gave him sensitive non-public information, and he should have known better than to trade on it, because it was so sensitive and who it came from, a long time relationship of trust and confidence.
FTA:
> We allege that Bechtolsheim, while serving as the chairman of a publicly traded company, abused the trust of a longtime business contact who had shared highly sensitive information about an imminent corporate acquisition," said SEC market abuse unit chief Joseph G Sansone.
xadhominemx
No, it is not. You seem very confident about this, which is concerning because you are incorrect.
wk_end
For someone as wealthy as he is ("Forbes lists Bechtolsheim's net worth at somewhere north of $16 billion"), a (less than) $1M fine seems more than gentle enough for "a lapse of judgement" and "not the most heinous crime".
bookofjoe
$1M is 0.00625 percent of $16B. For reference, 0.00625 percent of 100k = $6.25
wil421
Basically for someone with $1,000,000 it’s a $6,250 fine. Or a $1,232 with $197,000 (average net worth in US according to Google).
pera
> Median net worth $192,900
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf23.pdf
> [Bechtolsheim] net worth at $16.3 billion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Bechtolsheim
So then (923_740 / 16_300_000_000) * 192200 = ~$10.89
Just for comparison, the fine for jaywalking in Seattle is $68.
valleyer
No, you're off by a couple orders of magnitude.
ipqk
But it's double what he gained, which seems reasonable.
foobiekr
Why do you think wealthy people should be treated more leniently for the same crime?
wk_end
That's the exact opposite of what I'm saying.
seanhunter
> Bechtolsheim heard a rumour that Acacia had gotten offer and traded based on that.
That is pretty much the text-book definition of misuse of material non-public information (ie that's 100% insider trading).
Whether or not you think it's the most heinous crime is up to you but there's no question it's illegal.
maxlybbert
It’s material and nonoublic, but did he get it in violation of a fiduciary duty ( https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/01/18/insider-trading-l... )?
ghaff
It probably crossed a line given the amount, the person involved, and the timing. (And the fact that he tried to hide the transaction.) But lots of people get tips from friends or people at parties about things that aren't actually true or that fall through.
helsinkiandrew
This wasn’t a rumour overheard at a party though. Someone in a company (presumably Cisco) consulted with him about their pending purchase of the company.
If you buy options on a company just before some kind of deal (particularly if you haven’t bought them before) your relationship with anyone that knew of the deal is likely to be investigated.
acegopher
It doesn't matter if it is a rumor or not. The fact is it was non-public and material information. And that's the definition of insider trading.
maxlybbert
In the US, insider trading also requires a breach of fiduciary duty ( https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/01/18/insider-trading-l... ).
tptacek
Welp, there's the answer to the question I asked 6 months ago:
pests
I wanted to reply to something @eastdakota said to you in that comment chain:
> If you do a ton of work to launch satellites to fly over Walmart parking lots and then model the correlation of how full they are to what the company’s next earnings will be: that seems like you worked hard and earned an edge you can trade on without getting in trouble.
> [..] if you made it your business to ride the Acela every day between Greenwich and NYC, bought special hearing aides that let you better eavesdrop on conversations, and made significant profits trading on the information then you’d be more likely to be successfully prosecuted.
Aren't those both the same?
> Feels like anyone has a theoretically equal opportunity to do the same work you did and get the same trading edge.
Feels the same here too.
Just some musings while reading that old thread.
(all quoted comments @eastdakota)
arcastroe
I've always wondered where the line is drawn for insider trading. What is material non-public Information?
Say you find easily calculable mathematical solutions that break the security of crypto and you dump all your coins because you know they'll be worthless once you publish your research/algorithm.
Is that insider trading? Or would you be in the clear because you derived your algorithm from already public information that everyone else already had too?
Does the time scale matter? If you solve, dump, wait a few years, then publish, is it no longer insider trading?
maxlybbert
In the US, insider trading requires material nonpublic information, but it officially also requires that somebody break a fiduciary duty to the company involved. So, in your hypothetical, the person breaking cryptography algorithms knows something nobody else does (i.e., isn’t public), and that secret is definitely material. But the researcher didn’t get that information through a breach of fiduciary duty, so it’s legal to trade.
zharknado
IANAL but that doesn’t sound like insider trading to me. That’s more like activist short-selling à la Hindenburg Research.
This is assuming you don’t have ties to the organization that issues the token, if one exists.
tombert
You know, if you're going to insider trade, I really think it's a bad idea to buy options.
If he had just bought shares, he might have some plausible deniability to say that "I really believed in the company and I wanted to invest in it". It might still alert the authorities, but I feel it's less likely and I don't think they'd necessarily have enough to charge him.
With options, it is decidedly not an investment, just a gamble. Gambling is way easier if you are able to cheat.
gimmeThaBeet
At this point it borders on cliche, but he broke at least like 4 of Matt Levine's (Not Legal Advice) Insider Trading Laws:
- Don't do it
- Don't do it by buying short-dated out-of-the-money call options on merger targets.
- Don't email or text about it.
- Don't do it in your [mother's] account.
tombert
I hadn't heard of those, but that's brilliant.
The second one in particular just seems so obvious to me. Options are a case where you either "win or you lose everything", and even more you have to "win by a certain time". Options are kind of fun to gamble with, I've done it once, but the advantage of vanilla shares is that you can wait as long as you need to to "win". It doesn't provoke nearly as many red flags.
tlogan
It’s important to note that when large option trades aren’t part of a hedging strategy, they almost certainly attract scrutiny from the SEC.
TuringNYC
Wonder how the SEC sees the 99% of times people lose money on them, a la WSB
gregw2
FINRA was an early adopter of AWS cloud. Here’s a case study from a full decade ago, 2014. https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/finra/
When I heard back then they stored every side of every trade without getting hacked, I figured the Fortune 500’s security concerns with moving data to the cloud were likely to melt away, for better or worse.
0cf8612b2e1e
Losing money is the default state and nobody cares. Like gambling in Vegas. The House only notices when the money moves in the wrong direction.
smallmancontrov
Yes, lower leverage means fewer red flags... but more leverage means more money ;)
mhh__
Options are just a way of stating a view on a distribution, you can structure trades to cap risk in exchange for lower payoff and so on.
toomuchtodo
https://lawsofinsidertrading.com/
(Matt Levin's Laws of Insider Trading from Bloomberg's Money Stuff)
mgdev
Reading the actual case document, it's hard to chalk this up to anything but gross incompetence.
Dude gets off the phone after learning the information, and immediately calls the brokerage to write puts that expire 11 days later (strike 1).
He nails the strike price (keeping below 70; strike 2), and when the brokerage calls later he openly admits on the call that he traded on a nonpublic rumor (strike 3).
Absolutely zero subterfuge. He either has a blatant disregard for the law, or is an extremely high-functioning idiot, or both.
usrusr
Or a long history of remaining under the radar with similar things. People addicted to the tingle of risk-seeking can be surprisingly unaware of it.
riku_iki
He could be doing it for many-many times in the past, and thought this is something not catchable.
the_panopticon
At least it was just a fine and he avoided having to visit “Club Fed” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImClone_stock_trading_case
eggy
I wish the SEC would clean house of all the congress members and senators, Democrat and Republican, around 75 to 97 at last count, who had bought or sold stock or bonds, or other financial assets related to their congressional work. It's always the corporate boogeyman is always target number one in America. Pelosi and her ilk, including her husband, should have to live by the same laws as the people they supposedly represent.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/13/us/politics/c...
electriclove
Don't people go to jail for insider trading? Why did that not happen here?
sgt
You can't put Andy Bechtolsheim in jail. The guy is a legend!
1024core
> Forbes lists Bechtolsheim's net worth at somewhere north of $16 billion.
bithavoc
I don’t get why they need more money.
tombert
I think I get it now.
I did a reasonably good job at timing Nvidia stock. I bought three shares in February of last year, and it's more than tripled since then. Initially I was really happy to have bought when I did, but almost as quickly I started thinking "damn, if I had bought ten shares..." or "if I had bought an option contract instead..." as if me making two grand wasn't objectively a great thing.
It's not rational, but I think it must just be instinct to always want "more", no matter how silly it becomes. It seems like the first thing people want when they have a billion dollars is a second billion dollars.
spxneo
i actually lost a small fortune (now its nothing but back then it was a lot) on nvidia options as well as buying large amount of puts on a crypto mining company.
the reason im telling you is exactly the mentality you described: in Q1 I hit a major home run buying puts on a bunch of banks that went under. I experienced 28,300% ROI. From then on I was like an addict. Constantly loading up on insane amount of FDs until I lost all of what I earned.
Quite an experience and I think its best to just focus on building or growing a business. Had I bought stocks and held I think that would've been better.
Just realize the winners and pros are writing you the options in the long run. Punters like me, as I experienced, cannot last.
Also its a zero sum game. When I experienced financial ruin, I realized when I hit that 283x bagger, the person who wrote me those put options experienced financial ruin.
So now I'm jaded about options and financial markets in general. its a double edge sword. its a dangerous societal drug.
1024core
Small-time investors like us often get bit by the sharks.
I was working in a niche area, and our company used to keep an eye on the competition. One quarter we realized that the competition was not doing well, so just before their earnings came out, I shorted the stock.
Well, lo and behold! The stock tanked and I made a nice bundle by covering after the crash.
2 years later, again I see the same signs of a company that's not going to meet expectations. So I short again. This time, the MFers couched their quarterly report in language that hid the trouble they were in. They painted a rosy picture when we on the inside knew it wasn't going to come true. But the market bought it, and the stock rose sharply! ETrade forced me to cover my positions, and I lost all the money I had made 2 years earlier. Womp womp womp...
Of course, a few days or something later, as analysts closely analysed their earnings report, they realized that there was a lot of smoke in there and the stock tanked. But it was too late for me. From that point onwards I have stayed away from such gambling on the market.
tombert
I agree with everything you said, except is it actually implied they faced financial ruin with your 283x return? What if they were doing a covered call? Then they lose the stock, that sucks, but they're not going to go into debt.
I'm just being pedantic, your broad points are absolutely true. I mostly just through cash into VTI.
spxneo
because I talked to the guy who wrote those puts on wallstreetbets he was depressed from all the comments making fun of him so i sent him some money from the winnings
now that i experienced the exact thing he experienced, im just done with trying to make a buck from the markets because the profits come from others loss. options trading is a zero sum game.
maybe you can say same about about stocks or futures who knows. options also offer an important tool for managing risks like insurance. so again here im trying to attach some judgement to numbers which are amoral. I guess I just don't want to be part of something that causes so much emotional and mental violence anymore. I want to build and help create ease for others.
tombert
Ah, that's a sad story. I hope the person is ok; gambling debt of any kind can really mess with your head.
I don't think stocks are zero-sum. If I buy a share of AAPL and hold onto it for a long time, Apple wants me to make a profit because that means that they're making money too. I have completely aligned my incentives, and Apple can, at least in theory, keep growing and creating value by producing products that people like and are willing to trade their time and labor to get. I guess if you want to be really pedantic, it's zero-sum in that there is technically a finite amount of labor being done per-unit-time on planet earth, so I suppose that's the ceiling, but I think it's not zero-sum until it reaches that ceiling.
spxneo
I guess the intent also matters...like moralism is pretty shaky here i see
You can buy AAPL puts months before earnings as insurance....if you buy stocks and believe in the business fundamentals to help unlock more potential then that is a legit use.
i wish i had more positive experiences with the market. i feel like its a reflection of your inner world.
tombert
Yeah, I bought Gitlab when it IPO'd because I agreed with what they were doing. I felt they were making a product that's competitive with Github, and also were allowing me to run it myself if I wanted. I thought that was cool, I was glad to see they got big enough to IPO, so I bought a few shares.
I've lost about half my investment there, which if I'm being honest does makes me a little sad, of course I would rather have more money than I put in, but at least I think I doing the intent of the stock market. I think that the initial goal of the market was to enable people to invest into companies that they actually believed in, not to buy and sell shares a million times a second, or to buy and sell speculations at the same rate.
WalterBright
> not to buy and sell shares a million times a second, or to buy and sell speculations at the same rate
What this does is provide liquidity, meaning one can buy and sell at any moment. Contrast this with investing in houses. It's not liquid at all - even in a smooth transaction, it can take a month to close. Houses can sit on the market for months or even years looking for a buyer.
The higher the liquidity, also means the more accurate the valuations.
WalterBright
> its a double edge sword
Options may be zero-sum, but investing in general is not zero sum. For example, if you invested in MSFT 10 years ago, it's up maybe 10x since, and that extra value was created, not transferred.
gigaflop
I am technically a war profiteer due to stock trading. I bought and then kept trickling some money into an oil index fund when news was everywhere about negative $/barrel, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine made me $500 when I sold out.
(I don't actually feel like I did anything wrong, though. Just bought low and sold high, around oil macro events that anyone else could have seen)
spxneo
A trade is a trade. I've come to accept this after hanging out with a hedge fund manager. I was trading my ego and I was gambling and I placed all these unrealistic expectations from the market.
A trade is neither an expression of justice or injustice. It's just fucking numbers that we attach so much emotion and judgement on. Amoral != immoral.
gigaflop
I ain't rich enough to take a real moral standing in investing. The only principled buys I make are for ETFs/indices that sound like good ideas, but are nonstandard. Copper, Lithium, Uranium for now. The Earth isn't making any more of the stuff, and they're base resources for other processes.
WalterBright
> The Earth isn't making any more of the stuff
We're nothing more than pond scum on the surface of the Earth. The Earth is full of stuff.
dllthomas
A trade is an action you are taking in the world. Just numbers sometimes mean someone goes hungry or loses their house, other numbers mean someone gets bombed.
I don't actually know that it makes sense to judge these particular actions (especially of small players) in the face of the incentives, but I think your dismissal is too cavalier to be effective. The fact that your impact on the world is mediated by numbers doesn't itself absolve you of anything.
tombert
I mean, I own lots of ETFs, and I have bought-low-sold-high plenty of times. I've almost certainly benefited from war profiteering, either through oil fluctuations like you described, or publicly traded US defense contractors.
I'm not going to sit there and try and correlate VTI's price to ensure it's some kind of inverse to Lockheed Martin's performance, and I doubt anyone else is either.
gigaflop
I sold my crypto bags one by one this year. I felt fantastic for hodling long enough to swing +20% minimums on my btc, doge, shib, eth. Doge, I got +39%.
Then crypto kept going up. Whoops. Made money, but not all of the money. As a consolation prize, profiting any% on crypto probably puts me in the 1% of investors.
I will say I missed my best timing on Doge by literally sleeping on it another night. I was out at a bar with 2 of my brothers, and was joking that my Doge had hit +69%. Would have been up a few hundo if I'd sold then instead of day after.
tombert
It's a frustratingly easy mindset to have, and it's kind of objectively wrong. If I put down money, and got more money back without any real effort (outside of clicking a button or two on ETRADE) then that's a win. I got free money!
But that's just not how my brain works. Instead of being extremely happy that I got extra cash for nearly-zero effort, I'm sad that I didn't get more cash for nearly-zero effort.
I try and fight that mentality and focus on the good, but sometimes that's easier said than done.
gigaflop
My way of fighting the mentality is to be lazy. No joke.
I'm either Accumulating, Holding, or Looking to Sell. For stocks, I generally stick to #1 and #2. Buy if numbers/velocity looks good, hold if I don't like how they were doing.
When doing my taxes for FY23, my Robinhood showed zero crypto sales. Having seen a few winters, I am willing to wait 6 to 8 months before considering getting back in. Musk might tweet about Doge on the shitter again, and spike its price by +69%, but I don't have the patience to follow such micro movements. Show me the 1yr graphs.
omnibrain
> My way of fighting the mentality is to be lazy. No joke. There is also "too lazy".
I was too lazy to buy Tesla Stock during the Roadster Days.
I was too lazy to get some Bitcoin when a friend could not stop talking about it in 2010.
On the other hand, I would have sold both after they doubled or tripled for the first time. I know myself...
bastardoperator
Gambling has been known to be addictive.
tombert
It's a little annoying, because the only way to really preserve wealth is to push it into the market, and investing is always a bit of a gamble. There's reasonably low-risk tickers like VOO and SPY and VTI, and that is typically what I dump my money into, but it does concern me that the economics of the world has kind of forced me to embrace gambling.
I'm generally a pretty risk-averse person, I've bought two lottery tickets in my life (once when I turned 18, once again when the Powerball hit a billion in 2015). Unsurprisingly, I didn't win both those times. I would much prefer to keep my cash in some kind of government-secured savings account, but the interest rates in those rarely keep up with inflation, at least not long term. The closest I have found to that is treasury-bills, and I do use those, but I still put the bulk of my money into ETFs, AKA gambling.
WalterBright
I pondered for a long time what the difference was between gambling and investing. I finally figured it out.
Gambling is when the rate of return (over time) is negative.
Investing is when the rate of return (over time) is positive.
tombert
I don’t think I follow.
Suppose I buy a share in a company specifically because I believe in their business and products.
I think that’s pretty clearly investing, but are you claiming it would cease to have been an investment if the company went bust?
WalterBright
Over time, you're going to make money in the stock market. (That says nothing at all about individual stocks.)
Over time, you're going to lose money gambling. (That says nothing at all about what the next roll of the dice will be.) This is why casinos prosper.
Of course, if the US gets into nukular combat toe-to-toe with the Russkies, your stocks will likely vaporize to zero. But you'll be vaporized as well, so it's a risk not worth worrying about.
Less extreme, if the US goes hard into socialism, the stock market is not going to prosper. But your other investments won't prosper, either, so again that risk is not worth worrying about.
trogdor
> the economics of the world has kind of forced me to embrace gambling
How so?
tombert
I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but what I was trying to say is that the way that you're expected to preserve wealth in the US is to put your savings into the market somehow. Markets are sort of inherently unstable, or at least unpredictable, meaning that there's sort of an inherent risk to that, and as such you're "gambling", at least a little.
If you compare this to an FDIC-insured bank account, or a treasury note, there's effectively zero risk, so I would say it's decidedly not gambling, but the problem is that generally speaking zero-risk things don't pay enough interest to beat inflation, meaning that your money is degrading a bit.
Obviously there's a difference between YOLOing everything in GME vs putting a bit of money every month into VOO, but the latter still does carry some risk, particularly in the short-term.
WalterBright
The golden rule is the higher the risk, the higher the rate of return.
toyg
This is particularly true for financial matters, where everything is just a number; and particularly true for someone whose lifestyle won't be materially impacted by outcomes. It's just a game.
WalterBright
> It seems like the first thing people want when they have a billion dollars is a second billion dollars.
Of course. One's perspective changes right along with one's net worth.
It's the same thing with power. The more power one has, the more power one wants.
mmcdermott
Beyond a certain point, the money is a scoreboard not a resource. It's like watching someone spend hundreds of hours on a video game for a speed run. You played to win and this is the metric.
vladms
Can't say I understand this case (and don't know the details), but generally once you "train" yourself to do something and like it (basically, anything, like develop programs, run, watch movies, etc.) it is not that easy to just give up because you don't "need it". Making money or making startups can be addictive (the startup part I know from experience) and because the successful people might be the ones that are most addicted, that means they can't just stop even if they succeed.
e40
Yeah, that was my first thought. I didn't imagine he had that much, though, and it makes it even more of a head scratcher.
msie
Why stop at your first billion?
fourseventy
As a billionaire, why commit insider trading for a few hundred grand in profit?
LastTrain
Because the law rarely gets exercised and when it does the punishment is negligible, so I doubt it even factored into his decision. He's probably as surprised as anyone this happened.
toyg
Indeed. This was one occasion in which he was caught, but what's the chance he's already done it in other situations? Was this the first time he was privvy to market-sensitive information? Unlikely.
ActionHank
Need to get all that money so one day when they grow up they can buy twitter.
arcticbull
That's best done with someone else's money haha.
bcrosby95
Because they're trying to get the high score.
datavirtue
This. Do not underestimate the power of bordem to ruin lives. When people get bored enough rationality fades quickly.
sgift
> The complaint alleges that Bechtolsheim "knew or was reckless in not knowing" that the information he was given was non-public
There is a (small) possibility that he really didn't know (the second part of the complaint), but decided it's not worth a fight with the SEC cause it's such a small amount to him (and he has no interest in serving as an officer of a public company in the next few years anyway).
Though, the version others have said is still more probable: Reach people wanna get more rich, no matter the method.
zabzonk
the greedy can never have enough
lenerdenator
Because the system rewards it.
Well, at least it did.
isodev
Apparently it's only a problem if you get caught. How else is one supposed to become a "billionaire".
WalterBright
> How else is one supposed to become a "billionaire".
Invest everything you have into a company that put batteries into a kit car.
nextworddev
Unrelated - does crypto even have SEC enforced insider trading rules?
miohtama
It is debated and debatable whether CFTC, SEC or neither has authority.
However insider trade is crime regardless, and and a criminal investigation can be done by police. See:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-coinbase-insider...
tombert
Not quite insider trading, but John McAfee was charged with pump and dumping schemes with cryptocurrency. He killed himself before he was convicted, but there appears to be at least some kind of enforcement.
gnicholas
> Bechtolsheim "immediately" acquired Acacia option contracts when learning of the pending purchase by Cisco, which earned him $415,726 in profit when markets opened and Acacia shares rose 35 percent on news of the purchase.
Seems like a relatively small amount of money for a billionaire to risk jail for.
fsckboy
the crime is "trading on inside (non public) information". Insiders are actually allowed to trade, that's what happens when employees sell shares. "insider trading" is regulated in various ways, but Bechtolsheim was not an insider in this case.
hi
> "Bechtolsheim has agreed to pay a civil penalty of $923,740 for earning slightly more than half that for his illegal trades, and has also agreed to be barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for five years.
Forbes lists Bechtolsheim's net worth at somewhere north of $16 billion. The SEC fine is less than 0.006 percent of his holdings."
auntienomen
The fine seems reasonable. He disgorges the profits, and then gets fined twice what he earned and banned from serving on boards (worth far more than $1m over 5 years).
Big question for me is why was he doing crimes for such low stakes. It's like seeing a faang engineer rob a 7-11.
ooterness
Twice the illegal earnings that they know about.
mannykannot
We should not be punishing people for what we think they might have done.
I suspect the SEC may now be taking a deeper look for other surprising trades that might be linked to him, and if it finds anything he did not disclose in the course of reaching the current agreement, it will not go down well.
monkeydust
I think its well documented that people are not necessarily rationale when making risk/reward payoffs. Also perhaps he is just bored! Hopefully lesson learnt for him.
LastTrain
Should we go with a similar approach for shoplifting? Give back the merch and pay a fine + no criminal charges?
gspencley
To be fair, the punishment for shoplifting is often a slap on the wrist. I say this as someone who had a troubled youth and was caught shoplifting as a teenager. I got banned from the premises and no criminal charges even though the police did get involved.
If I had been an adult it undoubtedly would have been a tad harsher but unless the theft amounts to many thousands of dollars I don't think prison time is ever on the table. Even then I'd be surprised. We're not talking about grand theft auto, we're talking about shoplifting. So it's usually misdemeanour. If the merchandise is retrieved then it is returned to the store and the store can sue the guilty party recover to damages if it's worth it.
So I'm not really sure what kind of point you're trying to make. I think it's about inequality. I'm just not really sure how you get there by using shoplifting as your example.
LastTrain
Hey I think we both agree children should not be thrown in jail for shoplifting, or for insider trading.
If you shoplift anything of significance you might be looking at least a night in jail, but more importantly a criminal record. If you shoplift over the threshold of grand larceny you will absolutely be spending a bit of time in jail and will have a criminal record. These are virtually non-existent outcomes for insider trading, even though people "guilty" of insider trading are also thieves. Guilty in quotes because WTF knows, they are rarely criminally prosecuted.
So yeah, my point is generally about equality, but I was responding specifically to the casual "yeah that seems right" attitude about it.
ghaff
I suspect that much of the time it's pretty ambiguous. It's widely known that a company is ripe for sale and you hear from someone you know "confidentially" that they're in pretty serious talks with $X. Maybe they're a lawyer or a banker or...
And, in general, non-execs are not prohibited from unscheduled trading in their own company's stock (though company rules may prohibit trading in options) but lots of people have a pretty good sense of how the quarter is going.
kortilla
Shoplifting wasn’t a great choice since some cities are now pretty famously not enforcing the laws against it.
LastTrain
Shoplifting laws are occasionally not enforced. Financial crimes are only occasionally enforced. These things are asymmetric, and that is the whole gist of the argument.
kortilla
When people get a parking ticket they don’t face criminal charges.
The SEC is a civil authority discouraging behavior. A fine much larger than the upside is a perfectly fine way to handle that.
burutthrow1234
If the penalty for a crime is a fine, it's only illegal for poor people.
I think it's pretty clear that the law works differently for a man with 16 billion dollars. I don't mean that in a positive way.
not2b
I like Finland's approach to this problem: traffic fines are proportional to income.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-busine...
blackhawkC17
The SEC files civil cases; they have no authority to imprison. Only the DOJ can do that.
zabzonk
ah, no. that's a working-class crime.
ChadNauseam
I think the purpose of the fine is to disincentivize the behavior, not to sting necessarily. And to properly disincentivize the behavior it just has to make the behavior have negative expected value.
bryanlarsen
A fine of 2X profit is only negative expected value if the chance of getting caught is at least 50%. I'm very confident that the chance of getting caught is far less than 50%.
freeopinion
So you're saying that for a VC, where a common approach is to invest $1 million each in 100 different startups and if just two of them turn into $50 million then you break even, a fine like this is already factored into the game?
I wonder what the ROI difference is between the two gambles. 100 $1 million dollar bets returns $120 million? 20 $100000 insider trades returns $5 million - $1 million fines?
A 20% return is pretty good. But if it takes 2-3 years per startup, it's not as good. And it ties up $100 million.
A $2 million investment that pays out $4 million within a year is much more spectacular.
Edit: I am not accusing anybody of having made 20 insider trades. I am just musing about potential business models.
not2b
In some businesses, yes, fines are just considered part of the cost of doing business.
kortilla
Why are you confident of that?
hluska
Or twice the illegal earnings? I’m having some trouble parsing that quote.
tompetry
If he's earning just 5% a year on that $16B net worth, that's about ~$2.2m per day. Yet he used this info to gain $500k?
WalterBright
I once saw a documentary on teenagers' coordination before, during, and after their growth spurt. They were able to show that during their growth spurt, they were uncoordinated and awkward. The uncoordination came from errors in thinking the body was smaller than it was. It seems to take a while for the brain to adjust to their larger size.
If one's wealth goes up quickly by orders of magnitude, I'd expect it takes time to reframe one's thinking to match.
AS37
As long as this took him less than 90 minutes it would be a higher hourly rate of income. Not to mention that doing this would not reduce his other earnings.
Or maybe he did it for the thrill.
az226
Yeah it doesn’t add up.
Osiris
Why do people that have more money than they can spend in a lifetime engage in such high risk activities to acquire even more money that they also cannot spend in a lifetime?
It seems like it's more about the emotional connection to "winning", having more than others?
What's the risk/reward tradeoff look like here? It looks heavily skewed toward the risk side of the equation.
missedthecue
Sample bias too. A lot of poor people would insider trade if they 1. had brokerage accounts and capital 2. had material non-disclosed information coming across their desk.
Turns out only moneyed people are likely to have the combination, and we only see the ones that chose to act on it in the news, even if 99% wouldn't.
chihuahua
Yes, I do not understand this mindset:
"I have $16 billion dollars, and I'm going to do something risky/illegal so I can have $16.0005 billion dollars"
exabrial
Honestly I could care less what a few rich guys do when the get tips over golf games, as ultimately doesn't really affect me. Couple of light fines for the amount profited seems reasonable.
However, the people that need to be jailed are in congress and public policy makers using their positions to enrich themselves. Pelosi has an astounding ability to absolutely nail her really really deep options picks. https://www.reddit.com/r/unusual_whales/comments/l42l9w/nanc...
colechristensen
Insider trading takes a lot out of the pockets of literally everybody else, there’s barely any punishment when you get caught, and you’re really quite unlikely to get caught at all. It is a problem you should care about.
arcticbull
Yep, it takes money out of the pocket of whoever's on the other end of that options trade.
TuringNYC
It also manipulates the stock underlyer, which the average person owns, either directly or via retirement plans.
amadeuspagel
Manipulates it to make it more accurate and predictable?
TuringNYC
As an extreme example, look what happened with Gamestop. As people piled on to purchase more and more out of the money calls, it forced an infinite gamma squeeze where market markers selling the call options were forced to purchase the stock underlyer to hedge, driving up the price.
The effect isnt always that obvious, but it is there. It is also unfair to the person selling the option, if they are doing it with normal knowledge (not insider knowledge)
colechristensen
Not more accurate and predictable to public information, which is what a public stock value is supposed to represent.
danw1979
Andy is acused of buying “options in Acacia using the accounts of a close relative and associate.”
Is it possible he passed on information to these other individuals, and lent them the money to make the trades, but he wasn’t intending on profiting himself ? And he’s taking the rap because, yes he’s actually guilty of crimes.
I admit this is a generous and perhaps far fetched reading of the situation, but it’s bizarre that he’d risk the wrath of the SEC for a tiny gain in his individual fortunes.
burutthrow1234
Tipping is still illegal if you know the recipient intends to trade. The person who asked him for advice trusted him with material non-public information, if he shares it and it gets traded on he's liable either way.
To be clear the person who asked for advice was not tipping because they had a reasonable expectation that he would obey securities law and not trade based on the information. They were asking for actual business advice.
jiveturkey
> Bechtolsheim has agreed to pay a civil penalty of $923,740 for earning slightly more than half that for his illegal trades, and has also agreed to be barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for five years.
sadly, no deterrent effect here
the fine is adequate. but he should have a done a year at Club Fed and a lifetime ban on public boards.
blackhawkC17
This case seems weird...if he's guilty of what the SEC accuses him of, then it's also a clear-cut criminal case the Department of Justice can pursue.
That the DOJ didn't file charges makes it seem like the SEC's case is weak.
electriclove
Or he just knows the right people so just gets an effective slap on the wrist.
I don't really have any comments about the insider trading (other than whyyyyyy?) but I'll never forget Andy driving up in a ferarri at the old SUN executive briefing center (now part of the Facebook's HQ) in 2007 and giving us a presentation on the Sun filesystem hardware they had just released (Sun Fire) and he was really, really keen on telling us just how many power you could stuff into a single rack (like, kilowatts power, as well as CPU heft).
He was absolutely thrilled to geek out on the speeds and feeds and we also gave the ZFS author Mike Shapiro a bunch of crap about ZFS merging the logically distinct layers of storage (volume and FS management) while also strongly suspecting that ZFS's model would end up replacing Veritas or whatever it was people used in those days.