If you ignore all the ethical aspects of it and look at it as a purely economic transaction, whether it was a great trade or not depends on the odds of getting caught, not just the punishment if you get caught.
That's true. I wonder what the odds of getting caught are. I wonder how the odds would change if you had someone unconnected to you who placed the trades and shared the profits.
As I write this I can imagine a cryptocurrency marketplace for insider information. The insider asserts some fact about a company and stakes an amount in crypto. Buyers see the potential - e.g. "Amazon insider staking 1 million for X% return" and can choose to take on the deal or not. If the buyer does take on the deal they see the information and if the information is borne out then the buyer must return the insider's investment plus X%. Otherwise the buyer gets the insider's stake.
There's a lot of rough edges and potential for abuse, but I can imagine something like this making it hard or impossible to prove insider trading.
> As I write this I can imagine a cryptocurrency marketplace for insider information. The insider asserts some fact about a company and stakes an amount in crypto. Buyers see the potential - e.g. "Amazon insider staking 1 million for X% return" and can choose to take on the deal or not. If the buyer does take on the deal they see the information and if the information is borne out then the buyer must return the insider's investment plus X%. Otherwise the buyer gets the insider's stake.
