World Surveillance Group Inc (fka WSGI)

[montanar]

SEC again on the side of the lonely shareholders on today's NYT

At:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/business/06wall.html?th&emc=th

S.E.C. Is Looking at Stock Trading
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By JENNY ANDERSON
Published: February 6, 2007

The Securities and Exchange Commission has begun a broad examination into whether Wall Street bank employees are leaking information about big trades to favored clients, like hedge funds, in an effort to curry favor with those clients, executives at Wall Street banks said.

The inquiry, these people said, seems aimed at determining how pervasive insider trading, or the illegal use of market-moving nonpublic information, may be on Wall Street. Knowledge about a large trade, like the sale of a big block of stock by the mutual fund giant Fidelity, would tell a trader which way the stock would move.

Trading ahead of client orders, or front-running, has long been an issue on Wall Street. Large mutual fund companies have often complained in the past that Wall Street brokerage firms were front-running their trades, using information about the funds’ plans to buy or sell to make a risk-free bet on a stock’s direction...........