Ethics questions

Question

Going through the Level 1 Ethics section.  A few questions...

1.)  Does information about a company that comes out in open court count as "public"?  On the one hand, it was not channeled through the normal information outlets; on the other hand, the information is clearly accessible to the public uniformly.

2.)  Standard I(C) forbids Misrepresentation.  One example is to forbid the presentation of an investment as a guarantee, but there are varying degrees of "guarantee".  Is anything other than US Government debt considered permissible to present as guaranteed?  [Has anyone seen Uncle Sam's books lately?  :-)  ]

3.)  Can someone give me a briefing on carve-out segments and carve-out returns for composite construction?

christine · Answer

1. I should think so. "Samsung awarded patent advantage over Apple" would not be communicated via an analyst call, but at the same time it would be public information as 'news'.

2. Is there varying degrees of 'guaranteed'? In general the guidance is that one should not imply that returns are promised to any measurable degree.

3. There has been a discussion about carveouts here: