Recently, Nvidia and its CEO, Huang Renxun, have attracted widespread attention in the market.
On the one hand, Nvidia faces securities lawsuits due to disclosure issues related to cryptocurrency mining revenue; on the other hand, Huang Renxun himself has conducted large-scale stock sell-offs as the company's stock price has soared.
After 9 months, another large cash-out
According to documents posted on the SEC official website, on June 13-14, Huang Renxun sold 240,000 shares of Nvidia stock through market transactions, cashing out a total of about $31.2 million (approximately RMB 227 million).
This move closely followed Nvidia's significant increase in market value, which has surged by $526.4 billion in the past month. Huang Renxun's sell-off price range was between $127.78 and $132.23 per share.
It is worth noting that this was not Huang Renxun's first recent sell-off.
In fact, he launched a 10b5-1 rule trading plan in March of this year, under which he will sell no more than 600,000 shares of Nvidia stock over the next year.
For Huang Renxun, whose net worth has already reached $125 billion, selling stocks is a way for him to share in the profits of the AI leader's explosive growth.
According to statistics, the last time he sold company stock was on September 14 last year, when he bought 29,684 shares of Nvidia stock at $4 per share and sold them at an average price of $455.75, earning nearly $13.5 million.
However, Huang Renxun's sell-off behavior, although within the legal limits, may have an impact on market sentiment in the eyes of investors, as Nvidia's stock price has tripled in the past 9 months since the last sale.
Accused of securities fraud
In addition, Nvidia's sensitive period facing a key lawsuit in recent days has also attracted special attention from the market.
Before AI became popular, Nvidia was closely connected to the cryptocurrency mining market. Therefore, the extreme fluctuations in bitcoin prices from 2017 to 2018 had a huge impact on Nvidia's performance and stock price.
At that time, global miners had a high demand for Nvidia's high-performance GPU graphics cards, which could efficiently handle cryptocurrency computing tasks. However, with the collapse of the cryptocurrency market in 2018, Nvidia's stock price suffered a heavy blow.
Some investors believe that Nvidia did not adequately and transparently reflect the mining-related portion of its revenue in its financial reports, which led to misunderstandings in the market. In 2018, Sweden's investment company E. Ohman & Fonder AB, representing Nvidia's shareholders, sued the company and its CEO, Huang Renxun, alleging that they violated the US Securities Exchange Act and downplayed the contribution of mining activities to the company's revenue in their financial reports.
Although the lawsuit was initially dismissed by a regional court, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals later restored the lawsuit with a 2-1 ruling. The plaintiffs pointed out that Nvidia failed to meet expectations in its 2018 financial report, and Huang Renxun wrongly blamed this on the downturn in the cryptocurrency market, which contradicted the company's previous position.
In May 2022, Nvidia reached a settlement with the SEC and paid $5.5 million to resolve the allegations that it did not properly disclose the impact of cryptocurrency mining on its gaming business.
Subsequently, Nvidia appealed to the US Supreme Court to dismiss the securities fraud lawsuit. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case, and Nvidia's stock price fell slightly on the day the news was announced.
Edited by Jeffrey