Source: Golden Ten Data
Tech giants are piling up to sell stocks, which seems to indicate that they are predicting the top of the market. The biggest winner, Bezos, has already cashed out about 8.5 billion US dollars.
Insiders from seven US tech giants are following in the footsteps of Bezos and Zuckerberg to profit from the stocks that have boosted the US stock market.
Nearly a dozen executives and directors of these companies have recently stepped up their stock sell-off efforts, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. These sell-offs have made them profit of more than $160 million since the end of 2023, after not reducing their stock holdings for 9 years.
With$Alphabet-A (GOOGL.US)$/$Alphabet-C (GOOG.US)$CEO Sundar Pichai (Sundar Pichai) is an example. He has sold more shares this year than the whole of 2023. As of this month, he has made a total profit of 30 million dollars from nearly 20 sales. Since the beginning of last year, Alphabet's stock price has risen more than 90%.
$NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$Director Mark Perry (Mark Perry) has sold more shares so far this year than in the previous two years. whereas$Apple (AAPL.US)$Chairman Arthur Levinson (Arthur Levinson) applied to reduce his Apple stock holdings in February. This was his biggest reduction in more than 20 years.
An Alphabet representative said that the sale of Pice was carried out through a transaction plan. Nvidia declined to comment, while Apple did not respond to requests for comment.
These moves highlight that Silicon Valley insiders are cashing out their holdings after tech stocks bounced back from a sharp fall in 2022 due to accelerated inflation and rising interest rates. Nvidia performed the best of the Big Seven this year, in$S&P 500 Index (.SPX.US)$It ranked third, with a year-to-date increase of 83%.
Lloyd Greif (Lloyd Greif), founder of Los Angeles Investment Bank Greif & Co., said, “They all know that pigs are slaughtered when they grow fat. No one can perfectly grasp the timing of the stock market peaking, and now the stock market really looks quite bubbly.”
ranging$Amazon (AMZN.US)$,$Microsoft (MSFT.US)$,$Meta Platforms (META.US)$und$Tesla (TSLA.US)$The Big Seven US stocks, including the three tech companies mentioned above, have risen nearly 150% since the beginning of last year, partly because investors are interested in any stock involving artificial intelligence.
Recent quarterly earnings reports show that their gains are likely to continue. With the exception of Meta, the stock prices of other companies have risen since the earnings report was announced. Nvidia will release earnings reports later this month. It is the only company among the Magnificent Seven that has yet to announce results.
Even underperforming company insiders are selling stocks. Unlike the Big Seven, Tesla's stock price dropped sharply this year, but that didn't stop Chairman Robyn Denholm (Robyn Denholm) from applying to sell Tesla shares worth around $52 million this year, and she hasn't used these shares since 2022.
The Australian joined Tesla's board of directors in August 2014. In October of last year, she submitted a 10b5-1 trading plan to sell stock options due this year. Since the end of September last year, Tesla's stock price has risen by more than 800%, which means that even if the stock price falls recently, she is likely to reap huge profits. Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.
Bezos and Zuckerberg are the biggest winners
The biggest winner of the Big Seven's recent gains was Amazon founder Bezos. He sold stocks in less than two weeks in February, making a net profit of about 8.5 billion US dollars. This was his first sell-off since 2021, shortly after he announced he would move from Washington State, which recently introduced capital gains taxes, to tax-free Florida.
Meta CEO Zuckerberg's trust fund and his charitable and political donation entities began selling shares through a trading plan in November last year, and since then they have applied to sell more than $1 billion worth of shares. The latest sell-off came at just the right time, as Meta's shares have dropped by around 5% since then.
A spokesperson for Zuckerberg said he sold shares through a trading plan mainly to fund his and his wife Priscilla Chan's charitable causes.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the total wealth of 60-year-old Bezos and 39-year-old Zuckerberg is about $378 billion, and most of their wealth is still linked to Amazon and Meta shares.
Claire Madden (Claire Madden), managing partner at London private equity firm Connection Capital, said that watching all these insider deals “you get the feeling that they are predicting the top of the market.”
The top leaders of some tech giants are also selling their shares for the first time.
Alphabet president Ruth Porat (Ruth Porat) sold the search engine giant's shares in March this year, making a profit of about $6.6 million. This is the first time since she joined the Silicon Valley company in 2015 after working for more than 20 years at Morgan Stanley. Since Borat switched from Wall Street to California, Alphabet's stock price has soared more than 500%.
Grave said that given that the US presidential election is being held later this year and the Federal Reserve says it will not cut interest rates for the time being, it is not surprising that many insiders are profiting from the recent rebound. “No one wants to put themselves in a game of chair grabbing when the music stops,” he said.
Editor/jayden