Securities & Exchange Commission v. Bonan Huang

684 F. App'x 167
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Third Circuit
DecidedApril 10, 2017
Docket16-2390
StatusUnpublished
Cited by7 cases

This text of 684 F. App'x 167 (Securities & Exchange Commission v. Bonan Huang) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Securities & Exchange Commission v. Bonan Huang, 684 F. App'x 167 (3d Cir. 2017).

Opinion

OPINION **

SHWARTZ, Circuit Judge.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) brought an insider trading enforcement action against Nan Huang. A jury found that Huang engaged in unlawful insider trading, and the District Court ordered, among other things, that Huang disgorge more than $4.4 million. Huang appeals, arguing that the SEC produced insufficient evidence of the materiality of the insider information upon which he traded, and that the District Court abused its discretion by refusing to ask potential jurors a specific question during the voir dire process, permitting prejudicial arguments about his departure from the United States, and ordering him to disgorge his profits. Because Huang fails to show that the District Court committed error, we will affirm.

I

A

Huang was employed as a senior data analyst for Capital One Financial Corporation. In violation of the company’s confidentiality policies, Huang downloaded and analyzed confidential information regarding purchases made with Capital One *169 credit cards at over 200 consumer retail companies and used that information to conduct more than 2000 trades in the securities of those retail companies. On January 16, 2015, Capital One terminated Huang’s employment due to his violation of company policies. The next day, Huang boarded a flight to his home country of China. Four days later, the SEC filed a complaint against Huang, alleging violations of § 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, 15 U.S.C. § 78j(b), and Rule 10b-5, 17 C.F.R. § 240.10b-5(a).

Before trial, the District Court heard arguments about the admissibility of evidence related to Huang’s departure from the United States and his decision not to return for trial. The District Court rejected the SEC’s request to instruct the jury that it could draw the adverse inference that Huang’s departure and nonappearance at trial showed a consciousness of guilt. It did, however, allow the parties to present a stipulation that Huang flew to China the day after he lost his job “fearing repercussions from his violation of Capital One’s policies and procedures,” and permit each party to argue its view concerning the inference to be drawn from this evidence. App. 433.

Before the District Court empanelled a jury, Huang requested that the District Court ask potential jurors whether any of them possessed “a Capital One credit card during the relevant time period.” App. 26. The District Court declined to ask that question, explaining that the case did not involve the misuse of individual Capital One customers’ information, but the Court did ask whether potential jurors or anyone in their families had been employed by a credit card company or by Capital One specifically.

B

The primary dispute at trial was whether the Capital One data was material. Huang admitted to trading based upon nonpublic information but disputed whether, as the District Court explained, “a reasonable investor would have considered [the information] significant in making an investment decision.” App. 669.

At the start of the trial, the District Court read a number of stipulated facts to the jury, including that: Huang conducted thousands of searches of the Capital One database to collect confidential credit card revenue data of over 100 consumer retail companies; he “lacked a business reason to conduct the searches”; he understood that the information he “accessed and used” was nonpublic; he “personally traded in the stock of consumer retail companies” on the basis of that information; and he understood that he was violating Capital One’s policies by engaging in this conduct. App. 433.

In addition to these stipulations, the SEC presented a witness from Capital One who testified that the Capital One database captured data of all Capital One credit card transactions, that Huang conducted thousands of searches of retail companies’ aggregated transaction data, and that Huang’s searches served no job-related function. The Capital One witness also testified that Huang had received training on Capital One’s confidentiality policies and on insider trading laws, and was terminated for violating the company’s confidentiality policies.

The SEC also offered the testimony of Stephen Graham, an SEC employee and expert in economic and statistical analysis. Graham showed the jury examples of the many spreadsheets that Huang used to analyze nonpublic information from the Capital One database along with historical, publicly available data. The spreadsheets used a combination of public and nonpublic *170 information to create projections of total revenue for approximately 226 publicly traded retail companies for a given quarter approximately one month before the companies issued public announcements about this information. Graham also described a correlation analysis he performed on the data Huang compiled on the 226 retail companies. Graham found that though the nonpublic Capital One data accounted for an average of only 2.4% of the companies’ total sales, for 132 of the companies, the sales data had a statistically significant relationship to the companies’ total revenues. This correlation indicated that, for those 132 companies, the Capital One data was a demonstrably valuable tool to predict the total revenues for those companies in a given time period. 1

Graham also showed the jury that Huang’s files compared his revenue projections to an amalgam of leading analyst reports about the companies’ expected earnings. These reports were publicly available studies of the companies based on “as much ... information as [the analysts] can possibly glean from anywhere to try and figure out what the companies are going to report.” App. 456. Graham concluded that by comparing his revenue projections to the analyst reports, Huang was able to predict whether a given company’s quarterly revenue announcements would outperform “Wall Street’s estimates,” in which case the stock price would likely increase, or underperform them, in which case the stock price would likely decrease. App. 456. According to Graham, “having information on the revenue from Capital One’s systems is going to help a reasonable investor make better decisions on [whether] to buy or sell securities in these individual companies.” App. 455.

On cross-examination, Graham conceded that he did not analyze the total mix of information available to the public at the time Huang made each trade but stated that the total mix was incorporated into the analyst reports, which “include pretty much everything.” App. 491. Graham also conceded that there are data points aside from revenue that might interest an investor before purchasing a security, such as a company’s earnings per share, mergers and acquisitions, and cash flow, and that a correlation does not necessarily result in an accurate prediction.

• Graham and a separate witness, Matthew Cain, also testified about Huang’s profits.

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Bluebook (online)
684 F. App'x 167, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/securities-exchange-commission-v-bonan-huang-ca3-2017.