Inside insider trading regulation: a comparative analysis of the EU and US regimes

Insider trading (also known as insider dealing) is a type of financial misconduct that has gained traction with regulators and supervisors around the world for decades. It refers to trading in securities on the basis of corporate information that has not yet been made public and which, if publicly known, would likely have a significant effect on the prices of those financial instruments. Due to the rapid expansion of global capital markets, insider trading has continued to increase dramatically, and the spread of its prohibition has been commonly observed in most jurisdictions.1 Indeed, the 1990s witnessed ‘an explosion in the number of nations’ that have adopted laws banning insider trading, and by 2000, 87 countries had explicitly implemented their own insider trading regulations.2 The policy rationale behind the insider trading prohibition is intuitive and straightforward. When one party makes a purchase or sale of stocks while in possession of inside information that is not known to the investing public, he or she is exploiting informational advantages to the detriment of the counterparty.3 Further, information asymmetry between investors is most likely associated with the problem of market failure, which hinders the willingness to supply liquidity and raises the cost of capital, thereby resulting in inefficient market outcomes.4 For this reason, the majority of jurisdictions (including the EU and UK) require that any price-relevant corporate information should be promptly disclosed to the public and restrict insiders who fail to make full and fair disclosure from using (ie trading based on or communicating with outsiders) the confidential information. However, it should also be highlighted that there are some counterarguments claiming that such a notion is rather biased towards market egalitarianism or even those advancing that insider trading could improve informational efficiency in the stock markets and thus benefit general investors, because it would ‘more quickly introduce new information’ which is otherwise not available to the marketplace.5 This is why US securities law and courts’ interpretation thereof substantially narrows the scope of insider trading liability. That is, securities trading on the basis of material non-public information is banned in the USA, if and only if evidence proves the existence of fraud, namely that a fiduciary-like duty is breached.