nramanand

I guess because the article is talking about insider trading through the use of options and your point on Taleb is how he traded options like any option trader would.

I should be clear that what you seem to think ties these together, i.e:

> given the volatility, at least one would be a hit in this month.

I don't actually believe to be true. It's not like these options aren't being priced somewhat accurately. There could be insanely high volatility and all that needs to happen is for the price to go up instead of down for none of your options to "hit."

Doesn't that mean he was long volatility?

Taleb's point seems more to be that he saw a mispricing and traded on it one day, rather than anything profound regarding option pricing, unless I am missing something. Anyway, it has little to do with what's being said in the article.

Isn't it literally all included in this umbrella section?

> Friends, business associates, family members, and other "tippees" of such officers, directors, and employees, who traded the securities after receiving such information;

I agree with you that it's possibly unanswerable, which is more or less the point. The broader idea is that there are lots of obscure interactions like that one I made up.

You can switch up the doctor and CEO patient for anything else. Bankers, lenders, family friends, former professors ... An unbounded number of humans that can come into contact with useful info to trade on. What do we think are the magical constraints that prevent them from doing so? Corporate etiquette?

The ROI will obviously be a function of what information is passed. But I think that I'm more interested in understanding how often it happens rather than that any one case is "low ROI". It is interesting to consider whether it's the ROI threshold that should philosophically make/not make something insider trading.

A relevant aside: surely insider trading is happening all the time? There are so many daily market-shifting events involving so many privy parties that it seems inevitable to happen every few minutes (not defending the actions in the article).

How many physicians have been able to get rich from learning a CEO will be out of commission? In that case, I'm not even sure whether it would be considered insider trading.

How does one even go about accusing someone of insider trading? The illegality sounds pretty unenforceable.

Even as a math graduate, I still think calculus is a bit weird.

The idea of successive approximations for a slope culminating in a dy/dx term -- where we say dx (really the denominator of the limit definition) is obviously not zero, but is also smaller than any given real number. It's not clear that numbers should work like that.

Pile on that calculus courses (at least in the US) tend to care more about deriving interesting trigonometric/exponential/polynomial/whatever derivatives once using the limit definition and proceed to have students essentially memorize the derivation tricks for the remaining 90% of the course, and it can easily end up being overwhelming.