A quarter of all publicly traded deals involve insider trading, but with less than 5% resulting in litigation, the vast majority avoid detection.
Researchers from the Stern Business School at New York University and McGill University examined stock options movements in hundreds of mergers and acquisitions over a 16-year period and found one in four deals involved some kind of insider trading.
They also found the Securities and Exchange Commission took a little over two years, on average, to prosecute a “rogue trade”, and the average rogue trade was worth about US$1.6 million (A$1.7 million).
Read more at New York University