Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open.

Can a CEO short his own company?
Yes. It's called executive hedging, and it's a lot more common than most people know. As long as it's properly disclosed and the decision is based on publicly available information, there's technically nothing wrong with it.  Krispy Kreme, Enron, MCI, and ImClone are the most notable companies that had executives do it on a large scale, but almost every company has or had executives execute a complex form of hedging known as a prepaid variable forward (PVF). In a PVF, the executive gives his shares to an investment bank in exchange for a percentage of cash up front. The bank then uses the executive shares to hedge in both directions for them. This provides a proxy that technically isn't the executive that needs to disclose.  There's talk about it needing to be more public at the SEC right now. http://www.sec.gov/news/statement/020915-ps-claa.html