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Ignorance is No Excuse: The Importance of Reg FD Training

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You may remember that Martha Stewart spent time in prison.

She served five months behind bars and another five months of house confinement at her 153-acre estate in New York, wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet, for selling 4,000 shares of ImClone Systems before news of the FDA’s rejection of one of ImClone’s cancer drugs was made public.

ImClone’s former CEO, Samuel Waskal, a friend of Stewart’s who presumably gave her the stock tip, served a seven-year prison term after pleading guilty to orchestrating stock trades, as well as to other corporate misdeeds.

How much insider trading is going on in U.S. stock markets based on material, non-public information? At least four times more than regulators actually catch and prosecute, according to research from the University of Technology Sydney. 

Could Reg FD training have helped either of them avoid prison sentences? 

We’d certainly like to think so. For Waskal, of course, he definitely knew better as CEO of a publicly traded company. Stewart may have never heard of Reg FD, but she should have known better as well, based on plain old common sense.

Whether you’re working at a public company for the first time, or you’re a seasoned pro, being aware of Reg FD (Regulation Fair Disclosure) and how to avoid missteps is vitally important. Many companies provide periodic formal Reg FD refresher training even for public company veterans. Not only does such training help prevent employees from disclosure pitfalls, but it also serves as a record that your company takes disclosure seriously.

Starting with the basics, Reg FD became effective more than two decades ago to help the SEC prevent selective disclosure of material, non-public information, remedying the perception of unfairness in communications throughout the investment community. One of the key principles of Reg FD is that information must be broadly distributed, not selectively disseminated. A good rule of thumb is to provide full disclosure to all … all the time.

What constitutes materiality? If there is a substantial likelihood that an investor would consider the subject important in the total mix of information when making an investment decision, and if it is reasonable to expect that the information could have an effect – up or down – on a stock’s price, it’s probably material.

Things to consider include receipt of a big contract, M&A, a stock buy-back program, a director or officer resignation, among many others. Materiality can be somewhat subjective though, so it’s important to communicate with your attorneys if there is any doubt.

There are two simple rules to follow to ensure you’re not running afoul of the SEC (and that you don’t wind up like Martha Stewart):

  • Never buy stock in your company, or encourage others to do so, when you are in possession of material, non-public information.
  • If you ever have questions about whether, and when, you, as an insider, can buy or sell your company’s stock, contact your CEO, CFO or legal counsel.

Keep in mind that while there are remedies for inadvertently disclosing material, non-public information, you should strive never to have to use those remedies. But, just in case, here are the steps to take should someone slip:

  • Let an authorized company spokesperson know as soon as possible, so that that person can work to promptly determine the nature and materiality of the selective disclosure. (Authorized spokespersons are required to determine the cause of the selective disclosure and take appropriate steps to reduce or eliminate the risk of recurrence.)
  • Within 24 hours of the inadvertent disclosure, or at the next opening of market session, a company may issue a press release or file Form 8-K with the SEC containing the material information that was deemed to be selective disclosure.

If it happened to Martha Stewart, is can happen to anyone. “It was horrifying, and no one — no one — should have to go through that kind of indignity, really, except for murderers, and there are a few other categories,” Stewart told Katie Couric during a 2017 interview on the Today Show.

Aside from providing Reg FD training to pre-IPO and newly public companies, along with refresher sessions, PondelWilkinson has been approved by the California Bar Association to provide one-hour Reg FD training sessions to attorneys for CLE credits. While we have to know the ins and outs to be effective trainers, we’d love to hear about your Reg FD experiences.

Laurie Berman, lberman@pondel.com

SEC Enforces Insider Transaction Rules As Boards Authorize Buybacks at Brisk Pace

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1903 stock certificate of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

1903 stock certificate of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (Photo credit: Wikipedia

Insider buying or selling of shares is one of the most emotional and telltale communications messages a public company can send.

Last week, the SEC handed out charges against 28 officers, directors and major shareholders for violating federal securities laws requiring the prompt reporting of information about transactions in company stock.  In addition, six publicly traded companies were charged for contributing to filing failures by insiders or failing to report their insiders’ filing delinquencies.
 
Curiously, the SEC did not say whether or not those transactions were on the buy or sell side. But this is important stuff and a subject that many investors hold sacrosanct.
 
Some funds immediately sell if they see insiders are selling for anything other than “personal” reasons, such as sending a child to college. And other investors immediately buy when they see insiders buy, believing those insiders must know something positive about the future. The same usually holds true when companies initiate buyback programs.
 
A news release issued by the SEC September 10 said information about insider buying and selling gives investors an “opportunity to evaluate whether the holdings and transactions of company insiders could be indicative of the company’s future prospects.”
 
Granted, it is important to look at much more than insider transactions when evaluating a stock’s viability. But as Peter Lynch, who is still regarded as one of the greatest and smartest investors of all time, has said on numerous occasions: “Insiders may sell their shares for any number of reasons, but they buy for only one—they think the price will rise.”
 
So while it is not necessary in this blog to name names of those violators, as the SEC’s press release did (in case you want to know), 33 of the 34 individuals and companies cited agreed to settle the charges and pay financial penalties totaling $2.6 million.
 
“Using quantitative analytics, we identified individuals and companies with especially high rates of filing deficiencies, and we are bringing these actions together to send a clear message about the importance of these filing provisions,” said Andrew J. Ceresney, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, in the news release.
 
There are usually no such communications issues when public company boards authorize buyback programs. Making a public announcement, usually via news release, is often one of the key reasons such programs are launched—to make a statement that one’s stock is undervalued and we’re not going to take it anymore.
 
In fact, according to an analysis by Barclays PLC as reported in the Wall Street Journal September 16, companies are buying back their own shares these days at the fastest pace since the financial meltdown, and companies with the largest buyback programs have outperformed the broader market by 20 percent.
 
Barclays’ head of U.S. equities strategy, Jonathan Glionna, as reported in the same article, said that among the reasons why companies do stock buybacks, “one is that it seems to work; it makes stocks go up.”

– Roger Pondel, rpondel@pondel.com