The details of the personal expenses that executives put on the company tab often are not known because loopholes in federal disclosure rules let publicly traded companies generally avoid disclosing the perks they give executives along with pay and stock options.
Financial news services and other media organizations get press releases 15 minutes before they are distributed to the general public, fueling a furious competition among the news services to rewrite them for their subscribers during their window of exclusivity.
The lower spreads mean lower costs for investors, because Nasdaq investors generally do not trade directly with one another. Instead, they usually buy and sell from market-makers, brokerage firms that flip shares between buyers and sellers and keep the spread for themselves.
For value investors, General Motors is a tempting target. The company's share of the North American auto market has steadily declined for two decades, and analysts say the company suffers from weak management and unexciting cars.
Insider trading is hard to prove. To be convicted, a person must have bought or sold a stock based on material information that is both unknown to the general public and likely to have had an important effect on a company's stock price.