Despite the collective decline after sharp swings this week, U. S. stocks maintained a 14-month record of a bull market. Interestingly, corporate insiders, such as the founders of the tech giant, are starting to accelerate the pace of reduction and seem to be seizing this excellent opportunity to cash in.

Insiders of US-listed companies have sold a total of $24.4 billion worth of company holdings so far this year, about half of them through pre-arranged sales plans, according to Bloomberg.The total of $24.4 billion in more than four months is almost equivalent to the total gain of $30 billion from the sale of their internal holdings in the second half of last year.

According to the incomplete statistics of many media:

• Amazon.Com Inc CEO and Bezos, the richest man in the world, sold their shares in the company three times in May, cashing out about $6.7 billion, accounting for 2% of the value of last year's sale.

• Facebook Inc founder Xiaoza and his charitable foundation have accelerated the sale of their company's shares since last fall, selling shares almost every day, with a cumulative total value of more than $1.87 billion.

• Alphabet Inc-CL C co-founder Sergey Brin, who has signalled plans to sell as many as 250000 shares, has sold $163 million worth of Alphabet Inc-CL C's stake in recent days, the first such sale in more than four years.

• Oracle Corp founder Larry Ellison (Larry Ellison) sold 7 million shares of the company last week for a total profit of $552.3 million.

• The venture capital arm of Noubar Afeyan, co-founder and chairman of COVID-19 vaccine maker Moderna Inc, sold a $1.4 billion stake in Moderna Inc in two months.

• Since March 2020, Yuan Zheng, founder of Zoom, and Ernest Garcia II, a major shareholder of Carvana, a used car retailer, have received more than $1.75 billion from selling shares in their respective companies.

• Over the same period, George Kurtz, CEO of cyber security company CrowdStrike, sold at least $250 million worth of shares in the company.

Thorne Perkin, president of Papamarkou Wellner Asset Management, told the media that the stock market, especially technology stocks, has risen rapidly since last year, making many billionaires who rely on this family have the risk of excessive concentration of wealth dominated by a single stock. From the perspective of portfolio management, it makes sense to spread the risk.

But some analysts say that the sale of shares by insiders will bring more liquidity to the market, and the consequences will spread to philanthropy, the art market, real estate and other areas.

Others argue that insiders are "shipping" crazily, taking advantage of the sharp rise in share prices brought about by the epidemic, highlighting the growing pressure on the valuations of these companies during a period of rising inflation expectations. Whatever the reason for the reduction, the signalling significance of large sales of their own holdings by insiders should be paid attention to.