SEC Insider Trading, Fiscal Year 2020

Enforcement actions charging individuals or entities with trading securities on the basis of material nonpublic information.

Insider trading is the SEC enforcement category with the widest resolution-path variance, because it is one of the few areas where the Division's civil case and a parallel DOJ criminal prosecution routinely proceed against the same underlying conduct at the same time. That parallel-track structure means the exposure question for a company or individual implicated in an insider-trading investigation is rarely just "what will the SEC do" — it is a joint civil-and-criminal question, and the criminal track's timeline and outcome frequently determines when and how the civil matter resolves rather than the reverse.

Duration in insider-trading matters is longer, on average, than in any other SEC category examined here, driven by the evidentiary burden of establishing trading connected to material nonpublic information — phone records, trading-pattern analysis, and cooperating-witness testimony take time to assemble and, where a parallel criminal case is pending, the civil matter is frequently stayed pending the criminal outcome. For a company whose employee or executive becomes a subject, the realistic planning horizon is measured in years, not months, and the disclosure obligations that attach during that overhang — particularly if the individual is an officer or director — compound over a materially longer window than in categories like delinquent filings or follow-on proceedings.

For insurers, insider-trading exposure interacts directly with D&O coverage in a way most other SEC categories do not, because the respondent is frequently an individual officer or director rather than the company itself, and because criminal conduct exclusions can apply differently depending on how and when the parallel criminal matter resolves. Pricing that exposure requires a duration-and-resolution model that tracks the civil and criminal tracks jointly rather than treating the SEC civil action as the entire risk.

Resolution paths split meaningfully between settled civil penalties (disgorgement plus a penalty, frequently without an admission) and litigated outcomes where the respondent contests liability — the litigated share is higher here than in most other SEC categories, because the reputational and criminal-referral stakes give respondents more reason to fight than in a sales-practice or recordkeeping matter. Criterica Intelligence frames insider-trading exposure as a joint civil-criminal duration problem, not a single-track enforcement question, for the companies, insurers, and funders that need to plan across both tracks at once.

Figures on this page are drawn from official agency publications, cited individually below, and reflect the agency’s own reporting as of the date shown for each figure. They are not Criterica Intelligence model outputs, are not predictions, and are not a measure of any party’s legal exposure or liability. Agencies periodically revise prior-year figures; where a revision is known, both figures are shown with their sources. This page does not constitute legal, investment, or compliance advice.