If your brother-in-law is a senior accounting executive at a public company, and that public company is secretly in negotiations to be acquired at a premium, and your brother-in-law is working on the deal, and you talk to him regularly while the deal is being negotiated, “including by phone, at [your] daughters’ basketball events, and at multiple family gatherings over the Christmas holidays,” and after each time you talk to him you buy some short-dated out-of-the-money call options on his company’s stock, and you call your son and tell him to buy call options on the company’s stock, and you take out a loan on your car to buy even more call options on the company’s stock, and you make up 100% of the volume in those call options on some of the days you trade, and then shortly after Christmas the company announces the merger and the stock shoots up and you (and your son) make a ton of money on your call options — is that illegal insider trading?
Source: Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Not Everything Is Insider Trading – Bloomberg
