When I got home last night I couldn't log on to ps and was getting the maintenance message. I didn't think anything of it and went to bed. Is the site back up and running today?I just signed up for ps a few weeks ago and moved a few grand from 888 over there and am kinda regretting it now....

I'm from the "glass houses" school of thinking.
Warren Buffet and George Soros are both inside traders (Soros convicted whereas Buffet not but no less guilty). Unless someone has done me dirty, I chose to not hold their past against them if I believe they have reformed.

As a former Securities lawyer called to the Bar in New York and Ontario, I agree; but, I chose to ignore that post because the last time I tried to address these type of ill-informed pronouncements frustration got the better of me and I came across as more a-hole than informed. Easier to let it slide.

heard there is special weekly challenge for VIPs...

A+

hahaha!

haha

I'm not a lawyer-never claimed to be one. But I've worked with and in public companies long enough to know that any employee in a non-peon role--meaning with access to material information--ignores these principles at his peril.

Anyway, it only takes a second to google the U.S. rules:

The majority of insider trading cases are brought pursuant to section 10(b) of the 1934 Act and
Rule 10b
-
5 thereunder.
4
To establish a Rule 10b
-
5 violation based on insider trading, the following
elements must be shown: (1)
that the defendant traded in the securities of a company of which he is an “insider,” i.e., the defendant is subject to a duty of disclosure (fiduciary), or “tips” such information in
breach of his fiduciary duty to one who trades; (2)
while in possession of material, nonpublic information;
and (3)
the defendant acts with scienter.5...
....Dirks
makes clear that an insider cannot do indirectly what he cannot do directly. Insiders, as
fiduciaries, cannot personally trade on the basis of material nonpublic information and cannot give such
information to outsiders so that they can trade on such information. “Tipping” material nonpublic
information is nothing more than a nondirect means of violating the “disclose or abstain” from trading rule...

There are subtleties and loopholes. For instance, it seems you can get off if you can prove that the other party assured you he wouldn't trade on the information but that's the gist of it.

Of course, Canadian rules may be different.

Forgot the source above:

http://www.americanbar.org/content/d...thcheckdam.pdf

Yes, the site is up & running again & there is nothing to worry about. It was a normal *PLANNED* & announced PokerStars server maintenance - this happens approx once a month for usually less than an hour & you can arrange for notifications to be sent to you by email the day before for all future server restarts by entering serverrestart into the Star Code box in your client
[Tools > Responsible Gaming > Star Code > click "Submit" button]

These restarts are usually at lowish traffic times such as 7am EST. This particular restart didn't go so smoothly with the implemented s/ware changes having some glitches, but I believe these are now entirely fixed.

Regarding your last point: There is no need to worry about the Baazov charge - the site doesn't depend on the CEO to continue running. In the medium/long term [months/years not days] there is some risk of some market regulators reviewing the licence they granted to PokerStars *IF* Baazov or others are found guilty. But I think the risk of an existing licence being pulled is small given that these licences aren't issued for free

Thanks for the info. I got a little sketched out with the coincidence.

Logic fail DUCY.

The only think I don't get is they made such a small amount of money. Imo the figures can't be right or they have a strong case of innocence. Surely with the amount of money these guys move the margins can't be that small that they only profited $1.5 million in a couple years of their scam?

I was always suspicious of the previously unknown Russian million dollar winner Zavid Badabesovitch given the rather strange anagram of his name.

But to address your point, the chasm that has always existed between rigtards and others is inevitably getting smaller. I wouldn't doubt the fairness of the deal, but there are still plenty of other ways that a site could potentially cheat players.

The figures they have been charged with will be what the Canadian authorities can stone prove outright. They likely made a lot more that cannot be proven in a court.

$1.5m sounds low because Baazov is now in the ranks of 'billionaire'. In actual fact, its a lot of money, and of course Baaz has profited enormously from any run up in share value. So he's going from park bench to 'gazillionaire and toast of the town' all the way back to a concrete cell. For sure they have hard evidence given the years put into this and the number of people involved. Any kind of conviction and he wont be allowed to run a hamburger stall even if he still gets away with plenty of loot. PokerStars needs a better home people.

To say Amaya just has to fire Baazov and then carry on with business, well Baazov is Amaya. The whole thing is his operation from the start years ago. You think General Wesley Clarke is going to come in and take up day-to-day operations? Doubt it. Maybe Dave was preparing his defence when he kindly spared the time to shake hands with the player reps that went all the way up to his office to get lectured

lollllll

insider trading is good for recs because he is taking money from the regs in the stockmarket and is definitely redistributing it to the losing players somehow. Most rec players don't invest seriously LDO.

very good, .................. missed that fallacy.

This stock (AYA) is more volatile than my ex-wife.

Just to be clear, almost every stock I have ever seen get bought out has a price spike before the buyout is announced. Also, most of the time stocks go up ahead of a positive earnings announcement and fall before a bad one. Insider trading is so blatantly obvious but most of the time people just ignore it.

Just saw this piece from the Globe and Mail that was written in the summer time, and it talked a bit about how the stock exchange has some sort of computer program in place that gets triggered when there's spikes ... then guess the authorities will do a manual follow-up?

It looks like the Globe and Mail requires a subscription, so couldn't link to the orignal source - but someone posted a copy of the article here -> 'Amaya: The largest insider trading investigation in Canadian history' https://advisor1.dynamic.ca/servlet/...cenic_24950113


Some other interesting stuff in the article as well ...

One interesting thing that I didn't know is that Baazov's brother Ofer/Josh is an accomplished con man and was clearly exerting lots of influence on early Amaya's decisions. In fact the way the article is written it kind of leads you to speculate Oferjosh installed his brother as a figurehead so they could pass themselves off as relatively clean. That leads to the possibility that its like Casino where everyone was thinking Phillip Green was Tangiers boss when the whole time Ace Rothstein, the straight ahead gangster has been the real power.

Can anyone explain why Baazov insider trading would make the stock plunge