Comments on: How to set up an insider-trading network

By: SelenesMom

SelenesMom — Sat, 14 May 2011 20:20:58 +0000

Sure, the money may have been a motivation. Or it may just have been a way of keeping score. But it sounds like a lot of what was going on was what used to be called, back in the day, “wanting to be a BSD.”

By: JimInMissoula

JimInMissoula — Sat, 14 May 2011 15:21:43 +0000

They did it for the money. I suspect the effort to reward ratio was favorable. A thousand bucks ain’t much to Joe Sixpack, but if someone gives it to him for a couple of phone calls, and he’s pretty sure he won’t get caught, then he’ll do it.

By: someone2

someone2 — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:21:40 +0000

@wah718: I strongly disagree.

RAJARATNAM didn’t make $60 million dollars; his company did. He wasn’t planning to, as you say “do a lot” with any of it.

KUMAR didn’t “do a lot” with his $1.75 million dollars — he invested it right back into Galleon.

Felix, these people didn’t do it for the money.

By: wah718

wah718 — Thu, 12 May 2011 23:00:45 +0000

Yes, 1 million dollars really isn’t a lot of money to rich people. And $500,000 is chump change!
Wait a minute … that’s totally not true.

Felix, they did it for the money. Somehow you have convinced yourself that rich people don’t think that a big pile of money is “worth it” , but actually they do. Maybe they pretend they don’t, but they do. And you can do a lot with even a paltry amount like $500K.

By: KenG_CA

KenG_CA — Thu, 12 May 2011 22:59:23 +0000

I’ve given up on caring about insider trading, just like I still watch NBA games even though I am convinced the league instructs the refs to favor certain players and teams at times, to keep the networks happy and the fans interested (I guess if Memphis were to play Atlanta in the finals, I might have to take that back, but it’s not going to happen).

If it’s not traders getting access to inside information, it’s brokerage firms issuing their incompetently written but widely read analyst’s reports, which always seem to jack stock prices around. They go up, they go down, often with no correlation to their performance or ability to sustain their business. The brokers make money when the stocks go up, they make money when they go down, so they are incentivized to create news that drives changes in stock prices.

What’s pathetic about this insider case is that the defendant probably wasn’t doing this for the money – he was a billionaire, and didn’t need an extra $50 million here and there. He was risking getting caught for ego reasons – he needed to be a top player. This should probably be filed along with the steroid cases.

By: someone2

someone2 — Thu, 12 May 2011 22:57:51 +0000

@Ulysses: my guess is that he was making at least a couple of million a year since he became senior partner in 1997, and then increasingly more for 12 years

By: AnonymousChef

AnonymousChef — Thu, 12 May 2011 18:50:01 +0000

I’m not sure that Raj and Kumar didn’t commit a crime at the time they agreed to commit securities fraud in the future. Conspiracy to commit a crime is itself a crime.

The question is at what point the conspiracy ripened, and I don’t know enough about the facts to know that.

By: Ulysses

Ulysses — Thu, 12 May 2011 18:37:42 +0000

Felix, you’ve gotten Rajat Gupta and Anil Kumar confused. Kumar might have been making millions a year eventually, but not in 2003 I suspect, and he was never on the board of Goldman.

By: msobel

msobel — Thu, 12 May 2011 17:34:29 +0000

I blame cable TV. Obviously they have been watching the Sopranos

By: someone2

someone2 — Thu, 12 May 2011 17:24:18 +0000

PS: clearly Kumar was no ordinary McKinsey partner, for good or ill

By: someone2

someone2 — Thu, 12 May 2011 17:23:38 +0000

Wikipedia excerpt below. I guarantee you both Gupta and Kumar were making millions of dollars a year.

“Rajat Gupta and Anil Kumar were senior partners together at McKinsey & Company for over a decade and among the earliest and best-regarded Indian-Americans in management consulting; they became friends and enjoyed a mentor-protégé relationship early into Kumar’s career as senior partner. The two men co-founded the Indian School of Business in 1997 and “were the face of McKinsey in India.”[53]

According to The Financial Times, “the two operated as a forceful double-act to secure business for McKinsey, win access in Washington and build a brotherhood of donors around the Hyderabad-based ISB and a handful of social initiatives.” [54]”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajat_Gupta

By: right

right — Thu, 12 May 2011 17:07:25 +0000

There’s almost no chance that Anil Kumar earned several million dollars per year at McKinsey. Rajat Gupta may have made that, but most partners do not.

By: EnricoPallazzo

EnricoPallazzo — Thu, 12 May 2011 16:52:03 +0000

I think you might be confusing Anil Kumar and Rajat Gupta here. They both worked at McK, but it’s Gupta that was worldwide managing director and on Goldman’s board, not Kumar.