, Columnist
Insider Trading Is Rife With No Regulators in Sight
From ADT to Fitbit, intense trading precedes official disclosure of corporate transactions.
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At 6 a.m. on Aug. 3, Google bought a 6.6% stake in ADT Inc., the largest U.S. home security company, for $450 million. ADT appreciated 100% as soon as the stock market opened. But the headlines detailing the transaction weren't a total surprise because more than a few people knew ADT was poised to benefit from an event big enough to be gaining Google's hitherto inaccessible technology.
Three days earlier, when ADT wasn't reporting much of anything, a series of computerized trading alerts derived from the algorithms of Bloomberg Automated Intelligence (BAI) revealed insiders' unmistakable handiwork: