His current assignment called for him to get a company's quarterly profit and loss statement and cash flow information, before the data was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and made public. His client was a dentist who didn't want to explain why he wanted the information. To Jack the man's caution was laughable. He'd seen it all before—the guy probably had a gambling problem, or else an expensive girlfriend his wife hadn't found out about yet. Or maybe he had just been bragging to his wife about how smart he was in the stock market; now he had lost a bundle and wanted to make a big investment on a sure thing by knowing which way the company's stock price was going to go when they announced their quarterly results.