Marcus Welby, Insider Trader

The abstracts from the upcoming American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting have arrived on physicians' desks and stock are jumping. And falling.

According to today's "Heard on the Street" column in the Wall Street Journal, physician/stock analysts on the payroll of the major investment banking houses are complaining to ASCO that its 20,000 members are trading on the abstracts. Other sources quoted in the story say, not so, it's just friends of these physicians who "hear" about what is contained in the abstracts.

An ASCO spokesperson says the group includes a cover sheet on the shrink-wrapped abstracts that clearly warns physicians who are planning to attend the meeting to keep the info to themselves.

That's clearly not working. Two years ago, there was a brouhaha over cardiologists serving as investment advisers to Wall Street firms. Now we have oncologists engaged in insider trading.

Where's the Securities and Exchange Commission? I've yet to see a news story reporting a single indictment. Early in this decade in the wake of the bubble collapse, Congress passed a "fair disclosure" law that required that all investors get equal access to relevant financial information when it is released. Abstracts of studies that could affect the price of a drug company's stock certainly would fall into that category.

As Jay Markowitz, a stock analyst for T. Rowe Price, told the Journal: "I'm disgusted by the fact that ASCO has continued this policy of releasing the abstract to thousands of members weeks ahead of the conference. I want to make sure there is a level playing field and people aren't trading in a way that disadvantages the rest of the market."