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...based Ivan Boesky, one of Wall Street's richest and most frenetically active individual speculators, had been snared in the biggest insider-trading case ever. In a consent decree Boesky, 49, had agreed to pay $100 million, which Shad described as "by far the largest" settlement obtained by the SEC for insider-trading activity. After a 16 1/2-month transition period in which Boesky will gradually dispose of his holdings, he will be barred for life from stock trading in the U.S. The tall, impeccably tailored Wall Street superstar has agreed to plead guilty to a single, unspecified criminal charge. Said...
Something momentous already had. At a single stroke the SEC had written finis to one of Wall Street's most spectacular and controversial careers, built up in little more than a decade. The federal agency had also taken a mammoth stride forward in the insider-trading investigation that first exploded last May, when the SEC filed a civil complaint against Dennis Levine, a former managing director of the Drexel Burnham Lambert investment banking firm, and charged him with illegal trading in 54 stocks. Levine subsequently pleaded guilty to four criminal charges and gave up $10.6 million in illegal profits...
Indeed, a study by SEC staffers has shown that when publicly traded firms announce major investments in long-term research and development, their stock prices tend to rise. One example frequently cited by marketplace defenders to show that investors can still embrace long-range results: Genentech, the California-based biotechnology firm that went public in 1980 to a tumultuous market reception, even though it had not yet brought out its first products...
...SEC's request, the Big Board has taken a small stab at curbing the ups and downs but with little success so far. On Sept. 19, the N.Y.S.E. experimented with a procedure of informing the trading floor half an hour before closing of the major holdings at that time in the stocks that compose the Dow. The aim was to allow counterpositions to be built up by competing traders, and thereby smooth some of the program-trading swings. The SEC hopes to repeat the experiment in December. The problem, though, is that the times when the market gyrations will take...
...tinkering is tried, current stock-market trends cannot be entirely reversed. Some of the benefits that computerized trading confer on institutional investors vs. individual investors are permanent. One of those advantages is the ability to buy and sell entire portfolios of stock at once, rather than individual issues. Admits SEC Commissioner Joseph Grundfest: "One of the wonderful things about Wall Street has been that the small investor could lay the same bets as the big boys. Now you might need $9 million to play." He adds, "If you're not computer sophisticated, you're behind the eight ball...