We’re not big on research but it has to be some kind of record to be under federal indictment for insider trading less than 15 months after graduating from college.
So, congrats to BIll Tsai on making history!
According to his LinkedIn page, young Mr. Tsai got his BS at Stern last May, and a gig at RBC Capital Markets a month later.
According to the US Attorney for New York’s Southern District, Tsai spent a few days in March and April of this year working on his personal trading account. Specifically, Tsai was allegedly buying call options on the stock of a printing outfit named EFI. Those options had strikes and those kicked in about three days after Tsai stopped buying the options. And the reason that EFI stock had gone up was that it had been acquired by a private equity firm called Siris. Now guess which investment bank worked with Siris on the deal…and guess who the Fed claim they can prove had seen internal RBC documentation on the EFI/Siris deal.
So, what we have here is a 23-year-old being accused of the most old school basic strain of insider trading that we know to exist.
If this is true, we just want to say that we are beaming with pride to see the youth of Wall Street embracing the classics.
And we’d also like to dd that Bill Tsai appears to have been one of the RBC Capital Markets summer associates offered a job at the end of last summer. The fact that he’s now under arrest is enough reason to make us give a polite golf clap to those wily Canadians for handing out fewer offers to the summer kids this year.