Hacker Cinema
To Catch A Trader
2014 · Film · 53 min
Directed by Nick Verbitsky
Inside the government’s crackdown on insider trading, drawing on exclusively-obtained video of hedge fund titan Steven A. Cohen, incriminating FBI wiretaps, and interviews with both Wall Street and Justice Department insiders. In November 2013, hedge fund giant SAC Capital agreed to plead guilty to what prosecutors called “insider trading that was substantial, pervasive, and on a scale without precedent in the history of hedge funds.” “To Catch a Trader” goes inside the suspenseful and compelling story of this unprecedented government investigation, as correspondent Martin Smith traces how an insatiable search for trading “edge” ultimately doomed some of the most successful names on Wall Street.
1 positivefrom 1 commenter
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
1 comment on Hacker News
I’m not sure that it’s charitable to characterize either fund as being “built around gathering insider information and profiting”.
Raj Rajaratnam started at Needham & Co. in 1985, and worked his way up to firm president in 1991. He eventually bought the firm, and renamed it Galleon Group. If you look at the history of returns for Galleon, the most lucrative years were 1999 through 2002. Raj rode the tech bubble up, and got out before it burst. You don’t generate outsize, 90%+ returns solely on the basis of insider information.
As for SAC, for the vast majority of his career, Stephen A Cohen was a momentum trader in the style of Paul Tudor Jones. If you read the book Black Edge or watch the PBS documentary To Catch a Trader, at some point in the late 90s to early 2000s, Cohen started employing expert networks. The use of expert networks was legal at the time, and remains a grey area. Obviously, at some point Cohen crossed the line into outright insider trading.
My point for both of these examples was that both men were overwhelmingly rich by the time they got involved in insider trading. We can speculate on why they did it, but to suggest that they made their first hundred millions or billion with insider trading is inaccurate.