What I never understood is that company executives get to make projections as part of their earning calls which heavily influences the stock price the minute after. Doesn't this allow full price manipulation even when these insiders did follow protocol to sell their stock. (10b5-1 I think?) The CEO of a company I used to work at would consistently hold his stock after providing lower projections than market expectations. We would always end up beating those earnings projections, but the process would repeat. Once or twice a year, we would announce higher projections and the CEO would be scheduled to sell the following day with a nice price bump. Meanwhile the rest of us were in a regular blackout period following earnings.