Whispers of Mergers Set Off Suspicious Trading

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/business/27deals.html?ei=5065&en=5701a5f4e5b0ed15&ex=1157256000&adxnnl=1&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1156678850-zK3IOc9mTSx6UxBghX9vAg


Everyone trys, but... boy they do get caught don't they..


The boom in corporate mergers is creating concern that illicit trading ahead of deal announcements is becoming a systemic problem.
It is against the law to trade on inside information about an imminent merger, of course.
But an analysis of the nation’s biggest mergers over the last 12 months indicates that the securities of 41 percent of the companies receiving buyout bids exhibited abnormal and suspicious trading in the days and weeks before those deals became public. For those who bought shares during these periods of unusual trading, quick gains of as much as 40 percent were possible.
The study, conducted for The New York Times by Measuredmarkets Inc., an analytical research firm in Toronto, scrutinized mergers with a value of $1 billion or more that were announced in the 12-month period that ended in early July. The firm analyzed the price, the total number of shares traded and the number of individual trades in each stock during the weeks leading up to the announcement and looked for large deviations from trading patterns going back as far as four years.
Although any number of factors can lead to spikes in trading, deviations of the kind observed by Measuredmarkets are among the data used by regulators to spot insider trading. Of the 90 big mergers in the period, shares of 37 target companies exhibited abnormal trading in the days and weeks before the deals were disclosed.
Christopher K. Thomas, a former analyst and stockbroker who founded Measuredmarkets in 1997, said that his company’s analysis led to the conclusion that the aberrant activities most likely involved insider trading. Measuredmarkets provides examples of unusual trading to institutions, individuals and a regulatory organization in Canada.
It is always possible that a company’s stock moves because of developments in a particular industry or business sector, or because a prominent newsletter, columnist or blogger has written something that could prompt investors to take action. But in the companies that were analyzed, no such influences seemed to be at work. The companies were not the subject of widely dispersed merger commentary during the periods of abnormal trading, nor did they make any announcements that would seem to explain the moves.

Rest of the story at the link..............
 
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