Elon tells Tesla employees not to sell TSLA stock as board and execs are dumping

Owners selling is not indication of anything else than diversification. 80% of Huang's net worth is in NVDA stock. He is never going to buy more if he can avoid it.

That’s slated to be out this summer, but the insiders are certainly not behaving as if it will be. In fact, they’re acting exactly as one would if they expect it to be delete once again and/or underwhelm greatly.

Here's some background.

A short-swing trade is a sale of a given company's stock if you have purchased any stock in that company in the previous 6 months, or a purchase of that company's stock if you have sold any stock in that company in the previous 6 months.

The regulations want to discourage those kind of trades among officers and directors and people who own more than 10% of the company. Basically everyone who is required to report their trades.

I believe the idea is that those people should be focusing on running the company rather than trying to personally gain from short term fluctuations in the market.

The way it discourages these trades is if someone covered by the regulation makes a short-swing trade they can be compelled to turn over any profit from that trade to the company.

There are three things that make this quite effective.

1. It is enforced by any shareholder suing the trader. The shareholder does not have to have been a shareholder at the time the trades took place. They only need to be a shareholder when the lawsuit is filed.

2. If the shareholder wins (which they will because there isn't really a good defense) the trader has to pay the shareholder's legal fees.

3. The way short-swing trade profits are calculated is by matching up the lowest priced purchases with the highest priced sales, and then recursing on any shares that have not yet been matched.

Remember that the people this applies to have to report their trades and that data is public. When that data started becoming available in digital form a long time ago (on tapes bought from the SEC back in the mainframe days) there were securities law firms that started buying it and running programs to automatically find short-swing trades. It was then an easy matter to purchase a minimum amount of stock in the company, and sue the trader. They could get enough in attorney fees from this to come out ahead.

Even if the high probability that you will be caught and have to disgorge your profits wasn't enough to stop you, #3, the way profits are calculated might.

Suppose you bought 1000 shares at $100 a share, then a month later sold than at $90 a share. A month after that you buy again at $80 a share. A month later you sell at $70 a share.

In reality you have lost $20 a share on that series of transactions. If you started with $100k in your brokerage account and no shares, you were at $0 after the first buy, then at $90k after selling those, then at $10k after the second purchase, ending up at $80k and no shares after the second sale.

But in short-swing trade accounting this highest sale ($90 a share) is matched up with the lowest purchase (the $80 a share purchase a month later) and the difference counts as profit ($10 a share in this example). That's $10k you owe the company, leaving you at $70k and no shares.

Your $20 a share loss has become a $30 a share loss. Ouch!

The bottom line then is that people required to report their trades really tend to pick a direction (buying or selling) and keep with. They need to take a six month break from trading every time they want to make a trade in the opposite direction from their previous trade.