Jesse R. Mitchell, 48, of Ventura, California, joined The Trade Desk, Inc., the publicly traded digital advertising technology company, in June 2024 as Senior Director of Financial Planning and Analysis. The role placed him on the team that assembles the company’s quarterly earnings results, giving him access to The Trade Desk’s confidential revenue and earnings figures before they were released to the public. Mitchell did not wait long to exploit that access. According to the SEC, on two occasions beginning shortly after he joined, he used his advance knowledge of the company’s earnings to trade its securities ahead of the public announcements, first betting the stock would rise on good news, then betting it would fall on bad news. The two trades generated a combined profit of approximately $338,000. On August 20, 2026, the SEC charged Mitchell with insider trading in the Southern District of New York, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced a parallel criminal indictment the same day. Mitchell was arrested and charged with two counts of securities fraud.
The SEC’s complaint charges Mitchell with violating Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act and Rule 10b-5, and seeks permanent injunctions, disgorgement with prejudgment interest, civil penalties, and an officer-and-director bar. According to the SEC, Mitchell’s trading violated not only the federal securities laws but also The Trade Desk’s own internal policies, which prohibited trading during blackout periods around earnings announcements and, in the case of the options trade, imposed an explicit and permanent ban on employees trading in TTD options at all. U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald said confidential information is not a personal profit opportunity, and that Mitchell stole confidential information from his employer and made more than $300,000 in illegal trades.
A $20K Bet That the Stock Would Rise on a Q2 Beat
The first trade was the smaller and simpler of the two. In August 2024, before The Trade Desk released its second quarter 2024 results, Mitchell knew from his position on the financial planning team that the company’s revenue had come in above its previously disclosed estimate, a positive result that would likely push the stock up when announced. He purchased 3,850 shares of TTD common stock ahead of the release, a straightforward bet that the price would rise. When the company reported the revenue beat, the stock climbed, and Mitchell sold his shares in the day following the release, netting approximately $19,696 in profit. The trade was modest in size but established the pattern: Mitchell had confidential knowledge of an earnings result before the market did, and he used it to position himself for the predictable price move.
The trade also violated The Trade Desk’s blackout policy, which barred employees from trading in the specified window around earnings announcements precisely because employees in Mitchell’s position would know the results before the public. Trading during a blackout period is a red flag on its own, and Mitchell did it while holding the exact information the blackout was designed to protect. Had he stopped there, the profit would have been under $20,000. He did not stop there.
Banned Put Options Ahead of the Company’s First Ever Revenue Miss
The second trade was far larger and more brazen. Ahead of The Trade Desk’s fourth quarter 2024 earnings release, Mitchell knew something significant: the company was about to report its first revenue guidance miss since it went public in 2016. A guidance miss from a high-flying growth stock is exactly the kind of news that sends shares tumbling, and Mitchell positioned himself to profit from the fall by purchasing out-of-the-money put options, contracts that increase in value when a stock drops. When The Trade Desk announced the miss, its share price fell by over 30% the following day. Mitchell sold his put options that day for a profit of over $318,000. The single trade was more than sixteen times the size of his first, and it was built on advance knowledge of a negative result that the market had not seen coming.
The options trade violated an even stricter prohibition than the first. The Trade Desk did not merely restrict employee options trading during blackout periods; it imposed an explicit and permanent ban on employees trading in TTD options under any circumstances. Options carry more leverage than stock, allowing a trader to convert a price move into a much larger percentage gain, which is precisely why companies frequently ban employees from trading them. Mitchell traded the banned instrument, during a blackout period, on the basis of confidential knowledge of the worst earnings news the company had reported in eight years as a public company. Every layer of protection The Trade Desk had built was one he crossed.
A Company With a History of Insider Trading Through Its Earnings Process
Mitchell is not the first person to be charged with trading on The Trade Desk’s advance earnings information. In November 2021, the SEC charged Austin Rotter, who had obtained The Trade Desk’s advance earnings data through his job at an outside public relations firm for the company, and his mother Carol Cohen, a retired schoolteacher, with insider trading in TTD stock. Cohen bought $86,000 of shares based on information from her son and sold after the stock rose 37% on a positive earnings announcement, and the two paid more than $136,000 to settle. The recurrence of insider trading tied to The Trade Desk’s earnings, first through a PR firm employee in 2018 and now through an internal finance director in 2024, underscores how many people touch a public company’s earnings before release and how tempting that advance knowledge can be. The pattern of trading a company’s securities on confidential knowledge reached through employment also mirrors the case against Gavin Wolfe and former banker Jason Satsky, who traded a merger they learned of through Wolfe’s Wall Street connections. Mitchell, unlike the 2021 tippers, sat inside The Trade Desk itself, on the very team that produced the numbers he traded on.
Conclusion
Jesse Mitchell spent less than a year at The Trade Desk before the SEC and federal prosecutors say he twice turned his seat on the earnings team into a personal trading edge. He bought stock ahead of a Q2 revenue beat and made $20,000, then bought permanently banned put options ahead of the company’s first ever revenue miss and made $318,000 when the stock dropped 30%. Both trades came during blackout periods. The options trade broke an absolute company prohibition. He generated $338,000 in total and was arrested in August 2026 on two counts of securities fraud. The information he traded on was the information he was hired to help prepare. He saw the numbers first and bet on them before anyone else could.
