I don't completely agree with that statement. My wife is a senior executive at a Fortune 500 company. When the firm for which she works buys another company, they send out confidential emails that restrict senior management from trades in their own company positions as well as that of the target company. In theory these emails are highly confidential but leaks do happen from time to time.

Now if a person is caught telling a friend and that friend then trades on that information then THAT is insider trading. The simple act of leaking information is not in and of itself Insider Trading.

In this case, it is possible (and I would emphasize the word "possible" as this whole discussion is one giant fantasy thread based on a wild rumor) that someone in management leaked the fact that they were restricted from trading UAL stock. Then again they might have made the whole thing up for fun

Anyways, back to the fantasy world of UAL and JBLU merging. I just had another entertaining thought pertinent to this fantasy thread:

Organic growth has proven problematic for Legacy carriers throughout the history of aviation since it has almost always resulted in excess industry capacity. Mergers, especially recently, have proven very effective means to grow market share and still restrain industry capacity at the same time. Even if DOT demanded sizable divestures a merger with JBLU sure would go a long way towards enhancing UAL's ability to compete in NY and Florida against DAL, and increase market share, and grow the airline signifcantly almost overnight.