The insider trading you're allowed to do — Coached Weekly (https://coached.com/essays/reader-assets/cfd7d0265a547e10/fonts/TiemposText-Regular.otf) (../reader-assets/cfd7d0265a547e10/reader.f30115e9aec7.css)  (index.html#content) Skip to the essay (https://coached.com) COACHED Behavioral Science Lab  (https://coached.com/quiz) Personality    (https://coached.com/quiz)      The Personality Test 3 minutes. Six traits, your pattern, and an individually written report.   (https://coached.com/deep-read)      Career Deep Read A personality reading from your LinkedIn — what your career says about you.     (index.html#) Career Intelligence    (https://coached.com/elevator-pitch)     Elevator Pitch A sharper answer to "what do you do?" — built from your career.   (https://coached.com/ai-impact-map)        AI Impact Map How AI is likely to affect your role, and what to do now.   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(https://coached.com/login) Log in (https://coached.com/quiz) Take the test        Personality (https://coached.com/quiz) The Personality Test (https://coached.com/deep-read) Career Deep Read Career Intelligence (https://coached.com/elevator-pitch) Elevator Pitch (https://coached.com/ai-impact-map) AI Impact Map (https://coached.com/personal-brand-strategy) Personal Brand Strategy (https://coached.com/ask-coached) Ask Coached The Lab (https://coached.com/the-coached-model) The Coached Model (https://coached.com/coached-premium) Coached Premium (https://coached.com/newsletter) Coached Weekly (https://coached.com/pricing) Pricing (https://coached.com/quiz) Take the test (https://coached.com/login) Log in    (https://coached.com/essays/) Coached Weekly / In this essay The insider trading you're allowed to do      Part of  issue 366     In this essay 6 min read  (index.html#intro) — Introduction (index.html#section-1) 01 🤔 What "using it" actually looks like (index.html#section-2) 02 Why nobody “trades” it (index.html#section-3) 03 🔍 If your read is fuzzy (index.html#section-4) 04 🤝 The trades themselves  Return to where I was     Coached Weekly · 366 August 14, 2026  (https://coached.com/essays/tips/make-asks-while-your-win-is-still-warm/) 20-second career tip Make asks while your win is still warm  (https://coached.com/essays/insider-trading-is-legal-in-exactly-one-market/) Mentor’s Corner Insider trading is legal in exactly one market  (https://coached.com/essays/issues/2026-08-14/) Read the complete issue        Mentor’s Corner August 14, 2026  The insider trading you're allowed to do (https://rohanmahtani.com/) Rohan Mahtani  6 min read  About Rohan +  Hey, I’m Rohan! I write thoughts about life and career strategy a few times a month. I run (https://coached.com/) Coached , the behavioral science lab, and (https://resumeworded.com/) Resume Worded , the best software for job seekers. A good place to start is our (https://coached.com/quiz) free 3‑minute, science-backed personality test .     Insider trading is illegal in the stock market for a simple reason: it works too well. If you know the drug trial failed before the announcement does, you can't lose. So it’s banned, and people go to prison for it.  But there's a version of it that’s legal.  I’ll use an example to illustrate first. Take Nokia, the biggest mobile phone company in the ‘90s. When the iPhone came out in 2007, Nokia's engineers internally knew their phones couldn't compete with the iPhone - their software and hardware were years behind.  The outside world had no idea. To analysts and headlines, Nokia was still the giant of the industry and the iPhone was just a new entrant. But the people working at Nokia really knew how bad the situation was. In other words, they were holding exactly what an insider trader holds: information the market doesn't have yet (that “Nokia is screwed! ”).  A few of them “traded” on it. They retrained, and moved to Apple and Google while Nokia on a resume still opened doors. Instead of trading money, they “traded” their careers. But the mechanics are the same - they knew something early because they were internal employees, and used it to do something about their careers.  Most did nothing. They waited for the information to become public and when Nokia's phone business was gone by 2013, everyone hit the job market at once - which was way harder.  My point is: If you’re working at a company, you probably know more about the state of your company, your industry, and yourself than other people. But are you using that information?     ()     This illustration couldn’t be loaded. (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80,width=1920,height=3840/uploads/asset/file/6daed7d0-33d9-46df-bc1d-dac2e62a5c64/inside1.png?t=1786710967) Open the original image ↗    View larger       (Copy link to this section)    🤔 What "using it" actually looks like  Lemme give you three situations where people hold an edge and sit on it:  Things are bad, but you don’t act because of comfort : This is the Nokia situation. The product hasn’t really improved, or it’s being eaten by AI, the best people are leaving, and there are constant reshuffles. This is useful info: you’re seeing issues before management decides layoffs are necessary. In software, it often looks like the roadmap being rewritten every quarter, the engineers who built the core system quietly leaving, or a migration that’s been “nearly done” for two years. “Using it” is getting closer to the faster-growing competitors, or building new skills - like the people who left Nokia early.  Move closer to the “good”.  Say there’s an initiative at your company that’s doing very well. That’s inside information too. “Using it” means getting closer to that good, before it becomes the official center of the company and gets super competitive. In tech, that might be the internal platform other teams keep asking to use, or the small AI project whose usage keeps climbing before anyone’s announced it.  If you’re job searching: Most people apply to jobs based on big brand names, even though they aren’t necessarily the best companies. Use your own experience to build your search around where the opportunities are.  Almost everyone has that gap between what they know and what they're doing about it - it’s normal! I want to dig into why.     ()     This illustration couldn’t be loaded. (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80,width=1920,height=3840/uploads/asset/file/475bea6f-63a2-44fc-a3eb-08006ebf396f/inside2.png?t=1786711241) Open the original image ↗    View larger       (Copy link to this section)    Why nobody “trades” it  We don’t act on stuff like this because we’re often waiting for one of three confirmations: the numbers to show it, someone official to say it, or the move to finally feel justified.  The numbers arrive late. This is why most of Nokia’s engineers didn’t leave even though the writing was on the wall. Nokia had a record year in 2007, the year the iPhone came out. It just took time for the numbers to catch up. The cracks you see now show up in 3-4 years.  People wait for confirmation, and confirmation never comes. Researchers who studied Nokia's collapse found that middle managers were afraid to pass bad news upward. Execs had a reputation for shooting messengers, so at every layer of the company, reports got a little more optimistic. "We're in serious trouble" left the engineering floor and arrived at the top as "we're on track."  And the feeling of "now it's justified" comes last. Think about what "justified" actually means — it means the situation has become obvious enough that anyone would agree with you. But at that point it's not “inside information” anymore because everyone knows it. The edge was when the move was still a bit early.     ()     This illustration couldn’t be loaded. (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80,width=1920,height=3840/uploads/asset/file/9c7040d0-ec79-476e-8ae8-984d83b35341/crakcs.png?t=1786711217) Open the original image ↗    View larger       (Copy link to this section)    🔍 If your read is fuzzy  If you're unsure what you know, here are a few things you can run that no outsider can.  Customer energy:  Do customers still love the product the same way, or have things changed?  Pivot speed : When something clearly isn't working, does it get killed in a quarter, or does it limp along for two years? This tells you how fast your company admits mistakes — and companies that admit mistakes fast handle big shifts (like AI) much better.  And the big one right now: AI. Every company is currently figuring out how much of its work AI changes — and the official story about how that's going is the most delayed, most softened information in the building, for all the reasons above. Your inside view is far better.  Check whether leadership personally uses AI — not sponsors it, actually uses it, on their own work. It's hard to make good decisions about something you've never touched (imagine a CEO setting mobile strategy in 2008 who had never held a smartphone). If you’re an engineer, the quick version: are the people mandating AI coding tools actually using them on real work, or just announcing them?  You can also see how AI is landing on your own role: which parts of your job it's already doing, which parts it can't touch. For a fast, structured read on that, get your AI impact map — enter your LinkedIn, and it maps where AI is landing in your specific role.  (https://coached.com/ai-impact-map) Get your AI impact map   It’s free (for now, not forever!).   (Copy link to this section)    🤝 The trades themselves  One honest caveat: insiders get it wrong too. Plenty of smart people were sure Nokia’s next phone would turn things around, and in hindsight everything looks more obvious than it felt at the time. That’s why the trade doesn’t need to be dramatic.  Career trades are usually small. If things feel bad internally, the trade is spending your learning hours on the skill you'd need at your next role, and taking the occasional recruiter call while you still have a job.  If something's working, the trade is getting closer to it now — a coffee with someone on that team, volunteering for a piece of it — before it becomes official and everyone wants in.  If you're job searching, the trade is aiming your search at the corner of your industry you know is growing, instead of the famous names everyone else applies to.     ()     This illustration couldn’t be loaded. (https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80,width=1920,height=3840/uploads/asset/file/015ea557-9479-4d75-9ec2-3702a91945f2/inside5.png?t=1786711333) Open the original image ↗    View larger      Sometimes the trade is realizing you're in a good spot . Many companies pass these checks fine — the product's improving, good people keep joining, bad projects get killed. If that's what you find, great: you can ignore the scary layoff headlines about your industry, because you have better information about your own employer than any journalist does.      (Illustration of Rohan Mahtani) Written by Rohan Mahtani  (https://rohanmahtani.com/) Personal site (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohanmahtani/) LinkedIn      Share essay   Copy link    From Coached Weekly, issue 366. What else is in this issue?      I also send these out by email. This is (https://coached.com/newsletter) Coached Weekly , my career notes where I share the tiny % of ideas that actually work in real careers. It takes 5 minutes to read, but could speed up your career by years. —Rohan Mahtani ((https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohanmahtani/) LinkedIn ) Email address (Your email address) Send me the emails     Free. Unsubscribe any time. (https://coached.com/essays/) Read an issue first      (https://coached.com/newsletter) Subscribe on Coached →      (https://coached.com/essays/why-smart-people-miss-what-s-coming/) Another essay 6 min read  Why smart people miss what's coming    ‘Why smart people miss what’s coming’ looks at the same blind spot from the other side: dismissing what a new tool is becoming.    Hey, I’m Rohan! I write thoughts about life and career strategy a few times a month. I run (https://coached.com/) Coached , the behavioral science lab, and (https://resumeworded.com/) Resume Worded , the best software for job seekers. A good place to start is our (https://coached.com/quiz) free 3‑minute, science-backed personality test .  In this essay 6 min   (index.html#intro) — Introduction  (index.html#section-1) 01 🤔 What "using it" actually looks like  (index.html#section-2) 02 Why nobody “trades” it  (index.html#section-3) 03 🔍 If your read is fuzzy  (index.html#section-4) 04 🤝 The trades themselves   Return to where I was    (index.html#newsletter-optin) Get the emails    Share this essay    Copy essay link        © 2026 Coached Behavioral Science Lab (https://resumeworded.com/) From the team at Resume Worded (https://coached.com/privacy) Privacy (https://coached.com/terms) Terms         Copy quote   Section link  Share this essay ×   Copy link    Email     LinkedIn    Print / save PDF    More options     This file isn’t hosted yet. Public sharing needs a published page URL; printing works now.   From the essay ×  ()   (index.html#) Original image ↗   Copy link ×   Text to copy