Insider trading takes place all the time among professional investors. The trick is to have a plausible secondary source of information if challenged on the timing of your trades. Then there are the official schemes that allow certain employees a thirty minute window to buy or sell shares before an official announcement is made...
The Intel chip flaw delivered essentially random information that was held in a read ahead cache. Most unlikely that the cache would contain password data, but hoovering data from millions of computers and analysing the results can give valuable intelligence insights, especially if the target computers are in a specific group such as banking, insurance, or technology. The cached date would likely reveal speculative searches for data on particular projects or areas of interest. The main targets would be large organisations where lots of snippets can be gleaned about that businesss.