Not in the US. There's no insider trading angle at all, and it's not fraudulent market manipulation to attempt to persuade consumers to cease supporting a business you're shorting as long as you're not lying about it.

▲

jbstack 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Hence why I qualified that it depends on the details and the jurisdiction. I didn't say it is insider trading, just that you need to be careful to avoid that.

> There's no insider trading angle at all

Such a blanket statement would definitely be wrong in the UK for example. Insider trading is defined at Section 52(1) of the Criminal Justice act 1993 as: "(1)An individual who has information as an insider is guilty of insider dealing if, in the circumstances mentioned in subsection (3), he deals in securities that are price-affected securities in relation to the information."

Whether you trigger the offence depends on a number of factors such as whether the information is "inside" information and whether you were an "insider" (these terms are defined in subsequent sections of the Act). As an example, if you were an employee of a listed company (not such an unlikely scenario given the capital requirements to pull this off) that was about to engage in the proposed scheme (publishing pro-adblock adverts) and it wasn't yet publicly known (which would be necessary if you want the scheme to be fully effective), and you shorted Google shares, you could easily fall foul of insider trading.

I'm not particularly familiar with the US legal system so I can't claim you're wrong there.

▲

loeg 2 days ago | parent [-]

IMO you don't need to be particularly careful to avoid insider trading if you were never at risk of doing it. It's pretty obvious when you have a duty of confidentiality and when you don't (again, in the US). The hypothetical scenario upthread just doesn't have any of the elements.

> As an example, if you were an employee of a listed company (not such an unlikely scenario given the capital requirements to pull this off) that was about to engage in the proposed scheme (publishing pro-adblock adverts) and it wasn't yet publicly known (which would be necessary if you want the scheme to be fully effective), and you shorted Google shares, you could easily fall foul of insider trading.

Yeah, that isn't the scenario described earlier at all. Here's what was proposed:

> I wonder if you could spend a few million on promoting adblockers to justify a short position on Google or Meta.

In this sentence, the entity performing the short and performing the advertising are one and the same.

	▲	jbstack 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Realistically, the vast majority of people don't have a "few million" lying around that they can just casually risk on a huge gamble like this. It's likely you have at least several tens of millions but more likely hundreds of millions before the risk/reward would even come close to making sense (because you wouldn't want to commit most of your resources). The most plausible scenario is therefore something like a hedge fund. You're reading "you" to mean the reader (highly implausible), I'm reading it as the generic/impersonal "you" (as in "one could spend..."). So sure, there are a tiny percentage of people who might consider doing this themselves and they don't need to worry about insider trading (although we're still pretty close to market manipulation where the sole purpose of the adverts is to crash the share price and profit from that). A much larger percentage of people who might consider such a thing would need to at least examine whether they might trigger insider trading laws. Blanket statements don't work here.

▲

immibis 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

IIRC insider trading is any trading based on any non-public information. Everyone knows you're running ads because they can see the ads, but not everyone knows how long you're going to run them for, or how much you're paying for them, and that would be enough. Also if you do it before you start the ad campaign, that's non-public knowledge, similar to a pump-and-dump.

▲

loeg 2 days ago | parent [-]

Wrong. Insider trading is about breaching your duty of confidentiality to some other party who owns the information (your employer, some other business you have an NDA with, etc). The owner of the non-public information is fully allowed to trade on it.

Pump and dumps are fraud because you lie about the target stock in order to achieve the pump. The lying is a crucial element to make it fraudulent.

▲

immibis 2 days ago | parent [-]

> 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.[1] In many countries, some kinds of trading based on insider information are illegal. The rationale for this prohibition of insider trading differs between countries and regions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading

▲

loeg a day ago | parent [-]

The context of this thread[1], which you replied to, is specifically the US law. You are wrong on the US law. Wikipedia's general statements about what some countries do is not authoritative or specific to the US.

US law does not generally prohibit insiders from trading. It prohibits doing so only in breach of some obligation to keep that information private[2] ("in breach of a fiduciary duty or other relationship of trust and confidence").

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45178318

[2]: https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...

	▲	jbstack 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The context of this thread[1], which you replied to, is specifically the US law. That's not correct. I started this particular sub-thread, and in my original comment I specifically said that the answer is jurisdiction dependent. Your reply may have been US-centric but the overall topic was not.