Until last week, the CFTC had never brought an insider trading case for commodities trading. Indeed, the only example of insider commodities trading that most lawyers (or anyone else) could probably point to would be the ill-fated effort of the Duke brothers in the Eddie Murphy movie Trading Places.
In Trading Places, the theft of a confidential Department of Agriculture “crop report” helped Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy) and Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd) successfully corner the orange juice futures market while simultaneously ruining the Duke brothers (who lost $394 million based on a false copy of the report). Even that fictitious scheme, however, was not technically insider trading because there was no law against trading on misappropriated government information until the “Eddie Murphy Rule” (true story!) was added to Dodd-Frank in 2010.
