Upstart - Insider Trades Question

Hi all,
I’m new to the Board, but I have enjoyed reading everyone’s thoughts and analysis of Upstart. I am curious to what your thoughts are on the recent insider trades for Upstart. There has been quite a few since the last earnings announcement - the most recent sell of $60.52M on Oct 15th.
Thank you for your time and thoughts!
Sunshine

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Quick Answer: “Absolutely irrelevant.”

I won’t speak for the members of Saul’s board, but I suggest their general attitude is the same.

The example you cite is one where the general counsel of Upstart acquired 22,500 shares as compensation, via an options contract at $0.23/sh and immediately sold all 22,500 shares at ~$340/sh. Before the transaction she owned 14,230 shares and when she was done selling the 22,500 shares she had… 14,230 shares. And she’s got cash in the bank and cash to pay the Feds and the state of CA for her compensation. (She would not have been able to pay those taxes without selling… it’s likely a $4MM tax bill.) Overall, she’s just as directly invested in Upstart as she was on October 14, except she’s richer, too.

Before you even ask, Paul Gu sold $60MM yesterday and it doesn’t matter, either…

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To illustrate why you can’t make firm conclusions based on insider selling:

On December 18, 2020 Paul Gu sold 213,124 shares at a price of $18.60 per share. I don’t know how many shares he had at the time, but that was a good size % of his total. If you concluded you should not buy the stock simply because an insider sold a lot of his shares, you would have missed a 20x bagger in one year…

p.s. - David Girouard sold 1 million shares the same day…

Boy, those guys are dumb…

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Hi Sunshine, welcome to the board. Since you are new, you should take a look at the “Newbie’s place to start” and all the information available that is to the right side of each post. Such as Knowledge Base. This is a very structured board, unlike others.

Here is the link to the “Newbie’s place to start”.

https://discussion.fool.com/distilling-knowledge-34529397.aspx

Lucky Dog

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