legal, sure... timely, not likely... all of the data in EDGAR is delayed, people report when they have to, usually last minute on the requirement.. its good to see what they might be doing, but you are pretty much late to the party by then (IMO)...
I mean analyzing unusual options and stock flow without any announced catalyst, for example. Take a look at the option movement in AstraZeneca back in July, 3-1 days before bad data somebody collected puts worth $340k, 1 day later they were worth $2.4M Stuff like that, not EDGAR/Filings
There are numerous paid services that offer real time unusual activity. My favorite is Trade Alert. Occasionally there will be gold there, but there is a ton of noise. It could still pose legal problems - even though the date has been made public - if you were in possession of some related non public info. Every major bank/dealer desk either has a volume sniffer or buys an unusual activity service.
oh... sure... take a look at trade-alert.com if you want to recreate the trades, and at IvyDB if you just want EOD, neither is cheap btw, then once you have your training and test data sets for the issues you want to cover given a specific event (earnings, merger, announcements, etc.) you can then come up with features/parameters around that event to which you can apply ML that will then help you predict/identify possible candidates given those features across the entire universe of stocks... apply a few algo's to the same data set, and create a voting system of sorts for good measure?
It's common. Market makers get to have information disclosed thirty days before. I like to see firms front run and get burned by the info. It's a personal preference. P.s. If you're looking and interested, you can see positions way before the COT comes out.
No argument. As I said most of the big desks have either built a sniffer or buy. Neither is cheap and I confident the data is a fortune. You need both stock and option data to translate the "tied to stock" option trades.
Primary dealers do have algo's that alert to any employee activity in any company that has material info going forward 30 days. What happens as an employee is you get a request from your departments director, unless you're S&T. It's not a big deal unless the SEC has decided you're company needs to pay a fine, and then you're the patsy if there is evidence. Most of S&T is ivy, but they're as dumb as the street picker when it comes to illegal activity.
Thank you very much for that info! You know a cheap and good market data provider that would let me stream a few thousand tickers real time to feed into a python or java analyzing tool? sure is cheaper if i do it myself? also no risk of leaking secrets to them, so they could use it?
It's common. Market makers get to have information disclosed thirty days before. BS. If a bank is doing a capital markets transaction there is a information wall. If you are saying the information leaks it would be real easy to trace - what does happen is the capital markets side of a firm will notify the desk that they have been selected to work on the capital markets deal and the desk will have to reassign the option MM to another firm. They are then prohibited from dealing on other than a agency basis. Most capital market issues that require reassignment aren't takeovers. I won't argue that illegal leaks do occur. It isn't the SEC that uncovers most of them. It's contra-party complaining.
Get elected to public office. Our Senators and Congress reps can do all the insider trading they want.