Rodney Forrest: Insider trader ran secret stock picking comp for Australia’s investment elite

Insider trader Rodney Forrest was running a secret boys-only stock picking competition for 48 of Australia’s top investors during a period in which he illegally bought Platinum Asset Management shares in August and September 2024.

The secret list reveals Forrest, 41, networked across the heart of Sydney’s elite investment community for years, with top stock pickers and financial advisers from Goldman Sachs, Perpetual, MA Financial, Morningstar, Bell Potter and Antipodes, all in on the rogue trader’s competition to find winning stocks in 2024.

On August 12, Forrest pleaded guilty to using inside information to buy around $2.6 million worth of Platinum shares for himself and several clients in August and September 2024 to net a profit of $309,572.

The corporate regulator, ASIC, alleges Forrest made the trades while in possession of inside information that Platinum was the subject of concrete takeover interest from rival funds management group Regal Funds Management.

ASIC declined to answer whether it was aware of the private competition, although flagged it may form part of its investigations into the case and its enforcement of the financial services laws.

“While this issue (the secret stock picking competition) doesn’t form part of ASIC’s current case, ASIC will assess further, relevant information that may come to our attention as part of our normal operations,” the regulator told The Nightly this week.

This publication is in no way suggesting any of the stock competition’s participants named in the list were involved in the insider trading of Platinum Asset Management shares, or any other securities at any time. There is also no suggestion participants were in any way acting on behalf of the companies or firms they were working with at the time by taking part in the competition.

The list

Court documents reveal Forrest made his illegal trades after surreptitiously searching the desktop computer emails of Regal chairman Michael Cole for information. It’s alleged Forrest stole the information without Mr Cole’s knowledge after the Regal chairman left his office to attend a separate meeting while Forrest remained in his office as part of a role he had secured to provide investment advice to him, according to The Australian Financial Review.

The insider trading offence carries a maximum penalty of 15 years’ jail. Forrest appeared before Justice Robert Bromwich in the Federal Court on September 5 and entered guilty pleas. The matter was adjourned until December 15 for sentencing, with the public prosecutor and Forrest’s lawyers at Mangioni Biggs & Co ordered to serve relevant evidence or representations prior to sentencing due the morning of that date.

Based in New South Wales’ Blue Mountains, the married father of two young children and amateur rock climber also pleaded guilty to separate charges for running an unlicensed financial advice business named Sublime Asset Management between January and October 2024. That offence carries a maximum jail term of five years’ imprisonment.

Alpha-male drinks

The disgraced trader cooked up his stock picking competition over Christmas beers and wine at Mrs Jones’ Terrace Room at The Orient Hotel in Sydney’s historic Rocks area in late 2023.

Forrest arranged annual Christmas parties during his time working as a stock-market analyst at the Argyle Fund family wealth management office of billionaire Sydneysider investor Kerr Neilson.

The Christmas 2023 event attracted an alpha-male crowd of high-profile fund managers, analysts, financial advisers and investors who typically manage the wealth of Australia’s ultra-high-net-worth families.

Many of the stocks tipped to soar at the November 2023 Christmas party had ultimately bombed out by the time of Forrest’s guilty plea. The dud picks included biotech failure Opthea and Bell Potter-backed retail blow-up Cettire. Forrest’s personal pick of Japanese financial services group SBI Holdings has more than doubled in value since the party.

Some of the most successful stock picks included infant formula business The a2 Milk Company when backed by a high-profile stock picker at Perpetual who was part of the competition, alongside the nomination of US e-commerce giant Shopify by an investor at Brisbane-based tech and venture capital fund Abor Capital.

Miss Poland

Forrest promised the winner of 2024’s competition a copy of Poor Charlie’s Almanack book, which relays the investment wisdom of legendary US stock investor and Warren Buffett partner Charlie Munger.

At a prior year’s party drinks, one of the few female attendees was Magdalena Rudzka, a former Miss Poland, lawyer, and entrepreneur, accompanied by her partner and crypto entrepreneur Daniel Simic.

The pair were seeking investment for Mr Simic’s online gaming and crypto start-up PlayUp. Over Forrest’s stand-up drinks, Mr Simic boasted to party attendees about his recent return from an emotional roller-coaster of a trip to the Bahamas, where he met now-jailed crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried to seek funds for PlayUp.

Just days after the meeting in November, 2022, Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto business collapsed to leave Mr Simic short of an eye-popping investment amount.

In April 2025, a US district court threw out Mr Simic’s claim that PlayUp was owed $US450 million ($686 million) in damages by a business partner he said scuppered his FTX pitch just weeks before the fraudulent crypto exchange collapsed.

Chequered history

Forrest left his role working for billionaire Mr Neilson around the end of 2023 partly because the pair fell out over the leak of some corporate intelligence commissioned from a prominent local broker on ASX-listed candles and home decor retailer Dusk Group.

The rogue trader regularly professed his admiration for Mr Neilson, the billionaire fund manager, as a great investor and “the boss”. However, he complained he was too tight on pay and hard to work for, partly due to Mr Neilson’s sprawling feud with former colleagues and friends at Platinum.

Prior to working at Mr Neilson’s Argyle Fund, Forrest worked at investment conglomerate Washington H Soul Pattinson in a senior finance role, before working as a consultant to Moelis investment bank and prior to that running corporate teams at Aldi, Coles and Woolworths.

The insider trader first caught the mainstream business media’s attention in September 2024, when he ran an activist campaign to join the board of Perpetual Limited in an attempt to force the striking down of a deal to have the asset manager split up.