Trading Ahead of the News
Let’s say you are a prominent government official and a billionaire, and you own stock in a shady company. Eventually the reporter publishes the story, which details how shady the company is and implies that it is nefariously connected to prominent government officials. Five days before reports surfaced last fall that Ross was connected to cronies of Vladimir Putin through a shipping firm called Navigator Holdings, the secretary of commerce, who likely knew about the reporting, shorted stock in the Kremlin-linked company, positioning himself to make money on the investment when share prices dropped.