Value investing · Course 39 of 39 · The practice
What you may act on
Material non-public information, the theories of insider trading liability, Regulation FD, where a channel check stops, and where research becomes advice.
For a reader whose research technique has a criminal statute at its edge. The scuttlebutt method sends people to talk to customers, suppliers and former employees, and the line between building a mosaic and receiving a tip is drawn by law rather than by taste.
After this course you can say what makes information material and what makes it non-public, describe the theories under which trading on it has been held unlawful, state what Regulation FD requires of a company and what it does not, say where a channel check stops being a research technique, describe the disclosure convention for writing about something you own, and state the line between research and advice that this site sits on.
This course is education about what published rules and decisions say. It is not legal advice, it describes United States rules that differ elsewhere and change over time, and no lesson in it tells any reader what they may lawfully do in their own situation. That is a question for a lawyer. It assumes What a company must tell you and The research process.
The method, not the running of it
What you may act on is 6 lessons on running the whole method on one company. Running it is the part that only happens against real filings, on a real date, and this course has none of yours. It also cannot tell you the day one of your reasons stops being true, which is the part that matters after you have bought.
See our methodology for how the product reads a filing and what it refuses to compute.