Bank IT fella accused of masterminding multimillion-dollar insider-trading scam

Re: Got to admit he did a good job though

Least he spread the wealth around a bit :)

That's what got them caught. It's all about the Benjamin. Benjamin Franklin said it: "Three may keep a Secret, if two of them are dead."

Re: NSA is watching you

I bet that if they go to trial and their lawyers ask how the SEC got their intel, the case, or at least that specific accusation, might suddenly be dropped...

It has a lot more to do with how much you cheat the system by I think.

This guy could very likely have got away with it if he'd stuck to just doing it for his own gain and not shared the info with so many others. A few thousand dollars a year extra would pad his pocket nicely and be low enough value for him to either not have been spotted, or if he had been spotted quite possibly not investigated/prosecuted.

Re: parasites!

So why do we need a stock market again?

Try thinking, it may help you with this question and many others in your life.

But to spell this one out, the reason we need a stock exchange is because the vast majority of people and companies don't want to commit their capital to a single company for the rest of time. And why should they? If there's no stock exchange, there's no way out, other than illiquid non-market trading.

So we have limited liability joint stock companies, we allow these to have their shares traded and listed on stock exchanges, and NOBODY HAS TO TAKE PART IF THEY DON'T WANT TO.

There IS quite a high (albeit difficult to quantify) societal value in having a mature secondary equity market precisely so that people can make equity investments of differing duration, and get a decent value when they sell. Defrauding the market is what this crime is about, but whatever you think of equity markets, they're actually very useful to a modern economy. Imagine you were an early stage investor in Uber. Now imagine there's no secondary market, so your investment is locked in. And you're tied to the rollercoaster, with no way out, merely hoping for some dividends before it crashes. Is that really the scenario you want?

Re: Why always back in a winner?

Who knows how many fraudsters are doing precisely that. However, it does seem to be a psychological trait that these people become over-confident in their ability to game the system over a sufficiently long period of time, or brag about it to the wrong person. It only takes one red flag trip-point to trigger and that is it. How will you know if such a threshold has been tripped? You won't, there is no audible alarm, but once it has, data can be painstakingly collected until such time as the evidence is there to turn up on your doorstep and interrupt your plans for the next x years.

Re: What's going on here?

Problem is that he moved beyond greed to pride.

Impressing his girl friend's father, then impressing his bros.

Also, Rivas didn't make the required pay to play payments to sit at the table.