Why insider trading should be legal     Text Size   Published:
Friday, 26 Jul 2013 | 12:11 PM ET By: | Senior Editor, CNBC.com
Dylan Matthews of the Washington Post's Wonkblog officially
joins the cause.  They are justified as providing an even
playing field for small investors, but obviously such a playing
field doesn't exist. You really don't stand as good of a shot of
beating the market as a guy with an E-Trade account as you do
when you're, say, Steve Cohen. So you shouldn't try. Making
insider trading legal would make it clearer to individual
investors that picking and choosing stocks is a sucker's game,
and deter more of them from trying, to their financial benefit.
Keeping it banned creates an illusion of fairness that leaves
everyone worse off. Felix Salmon, arguing for bans on insider
trading, wrote, "If you want a nation of shareholders, you need
to give individuals some faith that they won't get picked off
like so many fish at a poker table." But we don't want a nation
of shareholders — or we sho