INSIDER DEALING

noun (Business World) The illicit use of confidential information as a basis for share dealing on the stock market; also known as insider trading. Etymology: Formed by compounding. In stock-market jargon, an insider is a person who is privy to information about a firm which would not be made available to the general public; insider dealing or trading is trading which is based on the confidential knowledge of insiders and is therefore one step ahead of the market. History and Usage: The term has been used in stock-market jargon since at least the sixties (and the practice for several decades before that). The debate on the moral issues involved and the need to make the practice a punishable offence became quite intense in the UK during the seventies, and the issue reached a considerably wider audience in the eighties as a result of the exposure and prosecution of a number of prominent individuals for insider dealing, both in the US and in the UK. A quick check shows that if you are caught for insider dealing in France, you are likely to get off more lightly than in Britain. So if anyone is accused of insider trading in Eurotunnel shares (which seems pretty unlikely on past performance), it will clearly pay to make clear that all the action took place on the other side of the Channel. Guardian 4 Aug. 1989, p. 14 Much energy...is spent these days on the criminal or near-criminal aspects of the decade's chicanery:...the insider trading of Boesky, Milken and others; the cowboy banking habits of Don Dixon. Nation 24 Dec. 1990, p. 818