I think it would be naive to assume that because "laws against insider trading are strict".  I think it would be naive to assume that the laws are so harsh that it prevents people from trading on insider information....and I think it would equally naive to assume that just because instances of charges being brought are rare, that there aren't ways to do it that evade detection.

Much of Granville's writings (my fav commentator) revolved around trying to determine what the "smart money" was doing....and one of his little bromides was:  "when the dumb money is scared and selling the smart money is confident and buying".  He didn't advocate simply buying on bad news, he suggested using volume price movements as a means to possibly discern smart money accumulation.

Look at our own most recent black swan event at the end of September.  Volumes shot up exponentially when compared to more recent trading...it wasn't much in the grand scheme of things, but compared to the days prior it was massive.  

September 30th's 4.2 million on Canadian exchanges and platforms was about 8x higher than the previous day's trading. From the begining of September until the 13th there was only one day that had total volume over 100K in Canada.

I think we can be pretty darn sure why people sold on Sept 30th....failure on the primary endpoint is the obvious reason.  But because there were bulls buying the shares being dumped the bottom didn't fall out of the PPS, it fell to somewhere around 35 cents and is now trading about 300% higher.  

Did the buyers know something the sellers didn't?  Hopefully we'll find out soon enough....its been too long a wait already.