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"Insider trading" is a term subject to many definitions and connotations and it encompasses both legal and prohibited activity. Insider trading takes place legally every day, when corporate insiders – officers, directors or employees – buy or sell stock in their own companies within the confines of company policy and the regulations governing this trading.
The type of insider trading we discuss here is the illegal variety that most of us think of when we hear the term; the type of insider trading that achieved wide-spread notoriety in the 1980s with the SEC's civil cases and the United States Department of Justice's criminal cases against Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky and which inspired even Hollywood's imagination with the movie "Wall Street". It is the trading that takes place when those privileged with confidential information about important events use the special advantage of that knowledge to reap profits or avoid losses on the stock market, to the detriment of the source of the information and to the typical investors who buy or sell their stock without the advantage of "inside" information.
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