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Comment by vorotato | Hacker News Reader

I think people waste a lot of money betting on the significance of CEO sales.

Real estate company CEOs selling their own stock was a canary for the 2007 crisis. Insider selling their own stock is often a tell-tale sign of the top of the market.

Is it a canary or a noisy red flag (too noisy to be useful) if the signal has a really high false positive activation rate?

A single insider is a noisy signal. A pattern of insiders is the red flag.

I had to climb down Intel's management pecking tree for a technical issue, and it was eye opening. I passed through 6 layers of management to reach 1 engineer.

Worst part of that was the management sucked up to me when an SVP was copied on the email, and low-key ignored me when she wasn't.

This political cesspool cannot compete effectively against driven companies like NVidia. Intel seems to be the new Blackberry.

Yeah, with how much people talk about diversity being important in investment I'm surprised selling stock is ever news. Also with all the regulation and scrutiny around them selling stocks it makes it even less likely that it actually means anything at all.

Exactly, this is a logical move to rebalance his net worth outside of Intel. Otherwise he's got a whole lot of eggs (including his career) in one basket.

So he’s the CEO who knows the most intimate details about his company, including what the next few years hold. If as CEO he’s not confident enough to have a whole lot of eggs in the company that HE is running, why would anyone in their right mind want to have a single egg in this company?

I think it's very difficult to understand everything happening at every level in such a large company, even for the CEO. Many random things could happen that would cause the stock to drop not directly affected by the CEO.

I don't follow this logic.

Different investors have different risk appetites.

If in your mind, the CEO sells one share of the company's stock and all of the investors should sell that stock, I think it would be a fantastic time to buy into the stock.

I think holding the minimum amount of stock, as he is doing, is a far cry from selling one share. I understand you can’t buy stuff to live with stock, so he’ll need to sell some, but there’s a big difference between selling some and selling the maximum you’re allowed to at every opportunity.

Correct, if he needed some cash freed up immediately he should cash out shares of an investment fund, not dump shares of the company he's CEO of.

And while the technical issue discussed elsewhere may play a role in people's minds, keep in mind that if it's only the CEO dumping stock he might be cashing out ahead of a #metoo

Also maybe he wants a new home.

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