Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Insider Trader Had All the Answers

Happy end of the SEC’s fiscal year

The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, which is yesterday. Unlike many financial industry employees, SEC employees do not, as far as I know, actually receive annual bonuses based on how much revenue (fines) they bring in in a fiscal year. Nevertheless they keep busy in September. We talked last year about a paper by Dain C. Donelson, Matthew Kubic and Sara Toynbee — published this year in the Journal of Accounting and Economics — about “the SEC’s September spike,” finding that “SEC staff respond to performance-reporting pressures and file more enforcement actions ...