SEC Charges Former J.Crew Executive with Insider Trading (with Lofchie Comment)
The SEC filed an insider trading civil action against an employee who traded on the basis of information, gained during his employment, that the store's sales were "performing better than planned (although not as well as the previous year on a comparable-store-sales basis)".
Lofchie Comment: Why did the SEC put in the parenthetical about sales being down on a comparable-store basis? Perhaps to show that the news received by the employee was not uniformly positive and thus the fact that the employee had to exercise judgment as to whether the news was, on the whole, good or bad did not prevent him from being deemed to have material information?
View complaint in full here (links externally to SEC website). See also: Press Release.