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Being a Good Husband Means Listening to Your Wife, Except When Insider Trading is Involved

Women everywhere who are convinced men never listen might gain just a small sense of satisfaction out of these two clowns who — despite getting in trouble with the SEC — prove that not all dudes check out once the lady starts talking.

“Spouses and other family members may gain access to highly confidential information about public companies as part of their relationship of trust,” said Jina L. Choi, director of the SEC’s San Francisco Regional Office.  “In those circumstances, family members have a duty to protect and safeguard that information, not to trade on it.”

This is the same reason why KPMG employees and their wives, brothers and dogs can't participate in Billion Dollar Brackets. YOU JUST CAN'T, OK?

For our first contender, we have Tyrone Hawk of Los Gatos, CA (that's "the cats" if you habla espanol), who allegedly "violated a duty of trust" when he overheard his Oracle finance manager wife talking on the phone about Oracle's plan to acquire Acme Packet. Cue Jimmy Conway "I've been telling you your whole life, Don't talk on the fucking phone, and now you understand, huh?" Mrs. Hawk also mentioned at some point that there was a blackout window for trading Oracle as they were in the process of acquiring another company. Tyrone, as husbands often do, maybe mistook that to mean "buy some of this stock" and probably also forgot to bring home milk. The SEC alleges he bought Acme Packet, and scored $150,000 upon a sell after the stock rose 23 percent on the Oracle news. Again, in true husband fashion, he agreed to pay more than $300,000 to settle the SEC's charges without admitting or denying the allegations.

And then we have Ching Hwa Chen of San Jose, CA (that's "St Joseph" if you habla espanol), who allegedly used a trip to Reno to eavesdrop on his wife's business calls. His wife — who worked for a company called Informatica Corp — already warned him not to trade Informatica but you know how men are, never obeying orders and such. On the way to Reno, he found out his wife's company would miss its quarterly earnings target for the first time in 31 consecutive quarters so naturally he established positions that would lead to profit should the stock price fall. Fall it did, by some 27 percent, and Chen allegedly made $140,000 as a result. Again, he did the manly thing and agreed to settle with the SEC for $280,000 but did not admit whether he was wrong or not.

No word on how long either gentleman will be sleeping on the couch going forward.