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Clearly imaginary but possible.
Picture yourself sitting at the opening keynote of a new tech company that's generated a lot of hype. Crazy lighting shows, smoke machines, and music lead to the same over-exaggerated presentation style seen in every other Silicon Valley startup. The CEO walks on stage, smiling confidently; his confidence is through the roof.
Then BOOM!
The live demo fails.
The backup demo fails.
The backup of the backup freezes, and now there's awkward laughter everywhere. You can see the engineers sweating over this failure with 4K clarity. The CEO is looking around nervously, saying, "Uh, we do this all the time." The stock price hasn't changed yet, and nobody has tweeted anything about this disaster yet. Financial news organizations are busy trying to find a catchy headline for another “innovative” company.
You are in the audience, not being paid, nor under any type of confidentiality agreement, just watching a company's slow and painful death happen in real-time.
You pull out your stock trading app, and while experiencing embarrassment on behalf of the crowd, you purchase put options on the company.
Although this information is not publicly available, it's also not a secret. Many other individuals are also witnessing the same event unfolding. The only difference is, the rest of the world has not yet learned of what happened.
So do you think this is illegal insider trading?
Or are you simply responding quicker than everyone else on Wall Street, due in large part to the fact you were actually in the room when the company failed?
Since you aren't an employee of the company, you will never find out what actually happened behind the scenes.
In the end, you were just present for the company’s failure.