Headscratchers / Defending Your Life

• Some Fridge Logic at work here: Daniel was offered a chance to invest in Casio back when it was a fledgling company. He was very skeptical, thinking the Japanese could never build decent wristwatches. The information came from the son of an executive at Casio, who told Daniel to buy stock when it was a low price of six US dollars. Had Daniel chosen to invest, couldn't he have been arrested and incarcerated for insider trading?
  • Maybe that was Daniel's fear; scoffing at the ability of the Japanese was just an excuse. Which admittedly isn't that great a lesson.
  • You'll notice that most of the cases against Daniel are money-related - at one point, he exasperately shouts, "I get it! It's all about money" It isn't. It's just trying to test his limits.
  • And no, the SEC won't come down on one friend telling another to invest in a company. Insider trading is larger scale, dealing with companies, not friends.
  • In response to the above reply, I disagree. According to this article by Investopedia, Daniel and his friend would be guilty of insider trading. The SEC defines insider trading as "buying or selling a security, in breach of a fiduciary duty or other relationship of trust and confidence, while in possession of material, nonpublic information about the security." Watch the scene again; Daniel says that once word hits the street, the stock's price would plummet. This implies that said information was NOT public as of yet. Plus the SEC has brought cases against insiders' friends and family who acted on such information; Daniel and his friend (being an executive's son) definitely fall in that category.
  • Since he didn't mention it at the time, it's probably not considered relevant. If he'd said something like "what you're suggesting is illegal, and I won't have anything to do with it," they might not even have brought the incident up. Respecting the law can't reasonably be considered "fear" in this system - if it was, the courts would be full of arguments like "he could have robbed that bank, but he didn't because he was afraid of prosecution! Taking that logic to its conclusion, any act of self-preservation whatsoever could be taken as evidence of fear.

• What was the point of Lena's montage of Daniel's bad decisions? They say over and over again that the point of the trial is to see if the defendant has overcome their fear, but none of the examples can reasonably said to reflect on his lack of courage. In fact, most of them seem to have been caused by his being careless or too trusting - or, to put it another way, not being fearful enough.