The stock didn't tank badly, it simply dropped by a significant amount. We don't know yet exactly when he sold, and so we don't know whether it was sold before the main drop.
He sold the stock because recently partisan political hacks have been hassling him more and more about owning this stock while dealing with health care issues. He finally had enough and asked them to dump it.
He is a pretty wealthy individual, and seems to be an honorable man, with a REAL job outside of politics as a doctor.
It seems to strain believability that he would have purposely and publicly sold his stock based on insider trading.
The same thing happened to Cheney, by the way. He had holdings in companies, and the partisans screamed he should divest, and he divested, and the stocks tanked, and the partisans asked if he knew something.
Outcome of course is no interest to the democrat political operatives. They screamed about Bush's "insider trading" where he sold stock supposedly because he knew the company had messed up. Even though within the year the stock value was above where he sold it.
I would be scared if I was a highly public individual who owned stock and had to sell. It will be a public act, and people will know about it, and it might cause a lot of other people to sell the same stock, causing the stock to drop -- and then it looks like you sold out in front of the wave because you knew something.
Frist's brother is a high ranking corporate officer of the company involved. I find it hard to believe that the brother did not speak with Senator Frist sometime between March and July, 2005. Frist said yesterday that he first asked for advice about selling his stock in April. His stock was sold in July. In early July, he asked the trustee of his 'blind trust' to sell his holdings.
The brother must have known the stock would take a major hit. According to PBS last night, Frist sold his stock just before the stock fell substantially. A nearly identical scenario to the transaction that caused Martha Stewart so many problems. And we all know what happened to Martha. An inside trading tip, IF it occurred in regard to Frist, appears not to have come from a stock broker or an employee of the broker.
Everybody's talking about this case as if Frist was in real trouble--what gives? I hadn' heard that.
If he really had his money in a blind trust, then he should be in the clear, right? If the stock is sold before the price goes down, that's because of the investment advisos, not Frist. Or am I missing something?