In the USA that would most likely fit the textbook definition of Insider Trading, which is bigly illegal
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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It only looks like insider trading if you forget the definition of insider trading and only read a headline curated to ignore the important details that show small, consistent sales across time regardless of company activities.
Well yeah of course I didn't read the article. I don't give much of a fuck about it. I took the headline at face value ("sold stock days before announcement") and fired off my Lemmy content into the ass crack of this butt land. You're welcome.
What?
Insider trading is the trading of a public company's stock or other securities (such as bonds or stock options) based on material, nonpublic information about the company
CEOs have to schedule their sales many months ahead of time. Also, it was 2000 shares, which is peanuts.
The article is focusing on this guy because people know who he is. Instead, they should be focusing on the board members who sold tens of thousands of shares right before the announcement. From Kotaku:
Tomer Bar-Zeev, Unity’s president of growth, ...sold 37,500 shares on September 1 for roughly $1,406,250, and board director Shlomo Dovrat, who sold 68,454 shares on August 30 for around $2,576,608.
That is way more sus.
Also, I actually didn't know this until yesterday, but CEOs are also permitted to buy shares of their own company, so long as they clear the purchase with the SEC. But that would indicate they're optimistic about their company...
CEOs have to schedule their sales many months ahead of time
As opposed to stuff like this, where they came up with it yesterday afternoon, right?
If they planned this change and the sale both months ago, what does it change? They scheduled the sale days before the change was answered.
What's hard to understand here?
I don't think it's that black and white, since he apparently has sold stock steadily through out the year (and hasn't bought any at all).
Slap on the wrist fine at most. The rich don't have laws.
He sold over $2mil, so maybe about $20k is fair.
They should loose half of the shares, at a minimum.
Depends on how far ahead he planned the sale. It does sound like he's getting ready to deploy a golden parachute while the company burns. Clean out his own stock while the price is still high enough and then say, "well shucks, who'd have thought that developers would leave in droves when we instituted micro-transactions for using our engine?" And walk on to overseeing his next disaster.
Seems like it's planned enshitification. Use lower costs and even free for individuals to get market share, then crank up the price once you have a large audience. It'll be interesting to see if and where indie developers jump to.
It was a scheduled sale. There's a term for it, but it's a fairly normal thing to have set up.
What it really sounds like is they looked to see that they had a scheduled sale, and then delayed the announcement of the new fees (and the planning of how they'd work) so that the sale price would be higher.
Or, another alternative here. They looked at the sale price, and thought "gee whiz this is low, how do I boost the stock price higher?" and since this idiot worked on microtransactions for EA, he thought that adding those to Unity made some sort of sense.
this is my shocked face :0
Probably, but SEC is completely captured and underfunded.
Not to mention he was also the EA CEO before...
Aren’t there laws against this sort of thing? I think that’s significant fraud and he should go to prison
laws? those only apply to the poor and minority groups.
Of course
It was a pre-scheduled sale.
They're announced months in advance and can either trigger on a set date, or at a set stock price. It's more complex than that, and can involve taxes and shit, but the sale itself was above board(ish).
They likely delayed the announcement of the fees to ensure a higher stock price for the sale, which starts getting into a gray area.
If it’s scheduled, which I know a lot of execs need to do anyways to trade stock, and it’s not just randomized and he knows when those sales happen, and he knows his decision is going to tank the price, he can manipulate what he announces and when it’s announced.
What’s stopping him from just announcing this, selling the stock in a timer, then waiting just before he’s scheduled to buy stock and announce that he’s changed his mind?
If I’m the guy who bought that stock from him I’d want to sue. He fucked some sucker over
That's why this is a gray area.
He's not bought any stock this year. He's just been selling off his compensation stock.
He might just be an idiot who thought no one would complain or jump ship from using Unity.
I dunno, I doubt he’s an idiot. But this game is all rigged anyway
It’s not against the rules because chodes like these guys get to write the rules. If we judge wether or not something is harmful by if it’s legal or not, our civil rights will continue to erode.
No, this is against the rules. Perhaps the penalties aren't harsh enough, as most financial crimes come with very little actual punishment, but there are penalties.