Generally I ignore insider selling of stock I hold, but this looks different. For one, there was a series of 12 SEC filings, the sellers were the CEO, CTO, CFO, Secretary and a member of the BoD. The filings were on August 20 and 22. Total of all the transactions was $123,141,848. Some relatively small number of shares were sold in order to meet tax obligations. Looking at the SEC filings on the AppLovin IR page, it looks like there were two additional form 4 filings that weren’t reported on Koyfin. The majority of transactions were by Adam Foroughi, CEO.
This seems quite a lot to me. Maybe too much to ignore. APP is down in pre-market activity today, 9:00 EDT, 8/25. The delta seems to range from down about $0.70 to as much as $2.00, less than 0.5%. Not much to get excited about, but maybe the news isn’t generally known yet. Nasdaq futures are down 0.39%.
He still owns 2.6M shares in his name and another 3.8M shares in trusts for his kids. If you count his unvested shares at 35M. You can see that he still has plenty of skin in the game. Almost all of his family wealth is tied with APP success. Even if he sell more than half his current shares, he would still be tied to APP success. I would argue that him diversifying his assets would make sense. I don’t like any stock being over 20% of my portfolio.
@PaulWBryant (and others) Yes, in fact AppLovin is trading up so far today, so my concern was misplaced. As I noted above, I usually ignore insider trading irrespective of buy or sell transactions (I give a little more weight to heavy insider buying). However, the dollar volume of the trades by a number of C-suite persons did make me a little concerned.
In any case, I appreciate the response because getting others to weigh in is exactly why I posted it in the first place.
Usually moves like this are to diversify since the CEO/C-suite has such a concentrated portion of wealth in one company. The nice thing is we have a safety net with securities laws and insider trading rules that the management should not be able to sell based on private information.
On the HIT thread with insider buying, I wrote I wasn’t sure if it was considered heavy insider buying. Looking at how much shares were bought, it was 0.94% of the shares outstanding, and bought all by non C-suite executives. This means employees purchased roughly 1% of the float, which is impressive.
I did research on this to see if I should get back in to the company because I’m a big fan of insider buying so I looked a the form 4s for the individuals listed on your other post. You can see that in Table I, Column 3 that they are all “A”, which means they were awarded stock. Also 4 of them got the exact same amount of stock 128,474. This is how the company is paying its directors. So its not insider buying at all, but stock based compensation.