Whistleblower investing

Legal examples

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• Thinking Strategically, p193

  • There is some strong statistical evidence that Coke and Pepsi reached a cooperative solution for their couponing. As reported on "60 Minutes," there was a span of 52 weeks in which Coke and Pepsi each offered 26 price promotions and there was no overlap. The chance that this would occur by luck if the two companies were acting independently and each offered 26 weeks of couponing is 1/495918532948104–or less than 1 in 1,000 trillion.

    • So if you could look for those kinds of statistical anomalies, and then have some way of broadcasting them to a large number of people at once, you could make a lot of money.

Illegal examples

• 2015.11.09 - sophos.com - Man charged for bogus tweets that sent stocks plummeting

  • A Scottish citizen was indicted on Thursday by a federal grand jury in San Francisco for allegedly using Twitter to spread disinformation, causing the stock prices of two companies to plummet.

    The Department of Justice (DOJ) said that James Alan Craig, 62, of Dunragit, Scotland, allegedly set up Twitter accounts using names similar to real market research firms so as to manipulate stock prices.

    Then, he allegedly tweeted about fictitious investigations into the two companies.

    The publicly traded securities of the two companies – Audience, a Bay Area sound technology, and Sarepta, a biopharmaceutical firm based in Washington – went into a tailspin.

     

  • were these tweets picked up by automated systems that didn’t cross-check their data or by humans that were too lazy or overworked to double check with other sources

    • Taking advantage of the imperfections in automated systems would be an interesting way to make money.