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What are they picking a jury for?

And please spare me the "She isn't being charged with INSIDER TRADING" line. Who cares? Certainly I didn't invoke those magic words. She IS going to trial and then the evidence will be presented and a jury will decide.

I was responding to your earlier response to someone's remark that she there is not enough evidence. Let me make this simple for you: You can not charge someone of share manipulation for claiming they are innocent if you are unable to prove they are guilty in the first place. The observation that there is not enough evidence here is entirely a valid one.

I was responding to your earlier response to someone's remark that she there is not enough evidence. Let me make this simple for you:

Let me make it simple for you: I'd like to hear the prosecution's case. That is all I said. No need to get in a dither and read more into people's posts and comments than is there. But you sure are protective of your Martha. Me? I'm neutral and waiting to see what they've got. And they have enough to proceed to trial no matter how many times you say they shouldn't be proceeding. They are.

Managing investments are probably 30-40% of my business life today and have always centered mainly on equities trading.

I have never been fond of Martha myself but I feel that many folks have let thier bias cloud their perspective.

She did break the law it would appear from a reasonable perspective but I don't know how they can determine who is guilty and who isn't precisely everytime. Nashville is the center of the universe in Corporate Health Care and I can tell you that I and many others here have traded on cocktail party talk before. It's like the old sayin: Buy Rumour, Sell Fact".

Rumours and gossip and tips are arguably the main stimuli of stock activity in the marketplace along with the obvious such as analysts ratings up/downgrades and earnings and news announcements.

I think where Martha went wrong was the fact that her info came directly from the top and she acted on it immediately. The prudent course may have been to say "Thank You" and call her broker and put in a moderate stop-loss order which would have taken place after the announcement became public.

It's ironic that the stock tanked and has since recovered I believe.

There is no doubt that her being a public figure has given an ambitious AUSA a head from which to hang his hat.

I'm ambivalent.

Since you either are, or used to be, a stockbroker, maybe you can enlighten us on this - the allegations in the indictment are that she got the insider information from her broker. Seems to me that the problem with charging her with insider information is proving that she knew it was insider information, since there is no proof that it came from Waksal, directly OR indirectly.

If I am right, that's why they didn't charge her with "insider trading."

As a factual matter, if a person with a seat on the NYSE gets a call from her broker telling her that a certain stock is going to tank, it might have been in her best interests to ask how he knew. But, as a lawyer, given what I know about the Fifth Amendment, if they both take the Fifth and neither can be enticed to roll over on the other, they're going to skate on that one.

Nevertheless, there was a criminal investigation going on, and Waksal is now doing time, and Stewart is now charged with lying about what she did and why.