Level Global, David Ganek talks about insider trading charges at Delivering Alpha Conference – VERY ROUGH notes below
You really had to question the incentives of this case.
The unjust was when hey raided our firm, they hadn’t even bothered to check our trading records, they had no idea whether we had traded what was in the affidavit
After the raid they never looked at what they gathered. 10:17
So you ask yourself what was the purpose of the raid?.. .leave some thinking it was political, a pandering to what was going on in the world that time
To me it’s not safeguarding the markets, it’s creating fear and risk.
Have sued prett, including supervisors (15 people total) 11:17
The us attorney’s office is completely opaque.. When we filed the lawsuit we had to cover the food chain of everyone who might be involved.. Before we filed we sent a draft of the complaint to the govt. We said if we’re barking up the wrong tree we want to know… i was sensitive to not charge people show weren’t involved. When we gave them the complaint… they completely declined our offer
Questions he has – what were they thinking of when they did the raid?
Preet said sometimes you get it wrong on raid (last year delivering alpha)
Peoples resumes have that moniker on it and it didn’t need to be that way (70 people working there) 16:35
There are three things in play here,
Accountability will lead to deterrence (barry and nancy supporting me).
Insider trading laws now: my strong feeling about that is don’t have an opinion on how they stand now other than they need to be made clearer. There very ambiguous now and to the extent they are ambiguous they favor the prosecutor. !!
It is a v consistent revolving door leaving the office (prosecutors – singer’s counsel who was number two for preet)
You have high profile cases, high profile prosecutors with no accountability who don’t care about.. And have prized jobs waiting for them attached to these cases
…
It’s not something that should exist.
I suspect that there prob wasn’t (way to avoid this)
We had institutional investors
I don’t think id’ have chosen not to be in the biz for the reason i ultimately had tom ake that decision.. I’d much rather have been up here talking about a good idea…i think HFs are epected to walk on water as an asset class and cannot for a variety of reasons.. Very few people have been successful at doing that.
Managers need to give investors time and investors ned to take real risk otherwise no one is going to be able to make…
