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How is this explained, or is it linked ? at all! to the Dan Rather stories and coverup by CBS;

In 01 Jan, Viacom was 45. By 10 August (immediately before these stories were supposedly given to Dan Rather at CBS by Burkett) they had fallen to 33. A loss of about 36% in company value in only 2 quarters!)

Then Viacom rebounds between 10 and 15 August: going up 9% in total value in less than a week to 36. (Could it be that insiders knew they had a hot story and stocks were going to move up soon in September and October on Rather's bootstraps?)

Then, across the week that the story broke, CBS stock was all over the place: up and down significantly! Each rapid swing can be immensely profitable if insiders know what will be said at each press release and news story.

But, since CBS stonewalling became apparent, and that the original story had no "news" value at all, plus the "real news" was that CBS had bankrupted it's "public trust" ...Stock value Monday -Sunday has dropped an additional 3.3% to about 34.75....

I've had occasion before, on a related thread, to note that the mkt usually does **not** draw any long-term conclusions about the share price of huge companies when a scandal such as this one comes to the fore. Sure, one invariably sees some amount of whopping and flopping in the share price, but -- and this is the key point here, IMNNHO -- you and I cannot have any sort of legitimate chance, even hope, to trade these shares (or options, FTM) profitably.

''Insiders'' or no, the difficulty in trading profitably in instances such as Rathergate is that you and I and our colleagues here can have exactly ZERO knowledge of when the next bit of news will ''break'' concerning the scandal. Yet, in swing trading, timing is everything. Hardly a sound game for us to play, true?

Contrast this type of news driven trade to famous and recurring trading opportunities such as the old (and wonderfully successful) play of buying MacDonnell Douglas call options a day or two after one of their MD-10 aircraft went down. The mkt-driving event in such a case is standalone and discrete; something happens, nervous nellies dump their shares, the price drops. A week or so later, the mkt realises that there has been no fundamental change to the company, and any ''bad parts'' stories or rumours or other potential problems, if they exist at all, are well off into the future. The price rebounds, generally to just where it was pre-crash, the call buyers sell back at a tasty profit, and life goes on.

BTW, in most cases, it won't be SEC-defined insiders who will be swing trading in event-driven mkts such as VIA just now. Instead, the participants will be hangers-on to those folks, whether individuals or funds. The typical formally-defined insider does not usually trade actively in his/her own company's shares and options because, for one thing, he or she is always under the microscope, and for another, the required paperwork can become very nearly unmanageable...and woe betide if a filing deadline is missed!