Cross-Border Insider Trading: Challenges In International Securities Regulation And Enforcement

The central difficulty in policing cross-border insider trading is a structural one: markets and information move across borders, while investigative powers and sanctions stop at them. The three systems examined here all prohibit the conduct, but they do so on different legal theories, claim reach in different ways, and depend on foreign partners for much of the evidence that decides a case. The existing cooperation framework has narrowed the gap, yet it remains a framework of expectations rather than obligations. This does not call for a single global insider trading code, which would be politically unrealistic. A more achievable path combines convergence on core concepts, stronger and better-protected information-sharing, some agreed method for deciding who proceeds, and support for regulators with the least capacity. Future work could test these ideas with enforcement data, examine additional jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom and Singapore, and study how new asset classes, including crypto-assets traded across multiple platforms, strain the same arrangements.

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