So he sells a bunch of shares right before the announcement that is likely going to tank their stock price
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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We should come up with a name for such an act
We should make it illegal too!
We need to make sure we come up with a way to enforce it as well!
Okay, you lost me there now buddy!
It actually is. The insider sells have to be announced well in advance.
Psst! That was the joke!
Makes it easier for executives to plan when to make announcements like this.
So he scheduled selling 2,000 shares 3 months ago. Then made the announcement a few days after the sales clear. Easily planned for on this type of announcement.
They also do the same thing for positive news that will increase the stock prices. Announce it a few days before their scheduled sale.
Creating a routine selling/buying schedule that coincides with expected announcement periods is pretty easy.
Something catchy, like the 'buy and bail'.
cum and run
Cocksucking!
Pretty sure CEOs need to jump through more hoops to sell their shares like reporting that they plan to sell.
And if they don't, sometimes they get a slap on the wrist, assuming the money is still within the country. Which it ain't.
Yeah. I’m not one to defend CEOs but don’t they usually have these orders in place years in advance?
Edit: Ask a question. Get a downvote but no correction. Why?
You think they just suddenly came up with this model? No shit they have to jump through hoops. That doesn't stop them from doing it in advance of something like this
Yes that appears to be the case...
A "bunch" being 2000 when he still owns like 3000x that. This was a quarterly tax sell off that an unethical reporter is using to get clicks.
Hes a dick but this stock selling isn't nefarious.
Not that scumbag ceos wouldn't do such a thing, but doesn't appear to be the case here: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U/ Anyways, investors love this subscription model recurring revenue junk, makes sense that if anything their stock price has risen from this announcement. We'll see how it pans out in the long term though.
Price is tanking at the opening bell while the market overall is flat or positive.
It's hard to say sometimes, announcement was yesterday morning and it didn't budge it much (when I originally made comment stocks had not yet opened for today). It could also be related to the consumer price index showing an inflation uptick this morning compared to July, raising concerns for more rate increases. That report was just released this morning so seems a more likely cause for a change today.That tends to hit faster growing tech companies with poor p/e ratios like unity. There are other companies with the same pattern today, and the drop around the same time. Maybe you could argue the backlash wasn't felt until overnight or something? But it's the stock market, no one can really say for sure.
Not that insider trading and things aren't huge problems, but a ceo who's paid in stock and has regular planned in advance sales of that stock doesn't seem quite the conspiracy to me in this specific case. This was another single 2,000 sale, small in comparison to the 50,000 shares sold so far this year alone for this guy. Ceos often have pay and bonuses tied directly to share price, so the idea they would force a policy they thought would lose money in a conspiracy to tank the share price all to sell another 4% of the total amount of stock he's sold this year at a 5% profit when he could just, not do that, and sell the stock anyways, seems like a huge stretch for me.
Like I don't understand what the conspiracy is supposed to be, ceo decides to tank company shares on purpose for no reason and then sells stock in advance? Why didn't ceo just decide not to tank company shares and continue to make lots more money instead? Presumably they thought this would increase their revenue and profits and therefore stock prices and were hoping it would be popular with investors. Like if he thought it would tank stock prices, the way to make more money would be just not to do it. Now if it's something like, unity ceo had advance knowledge of an earnings report miss and sold a bunch of shares under the table before the report was public, now that's insider trading and a big problem. Or unity ceo shorted hundreds of thousands of company shares and then tanked company on purpose. Anyways, this whole story just seems like uninformed click bait. Save the outrage for unity's decision to hurt game developers.
Depending on how long the backlash can stick around, I would expect to see it go down with a large exodus. In particular, if Microsoft gets upset about the impact it could have to gamepass. Unity does seem to be backtracking, but it really feels like they overextended on purpose to make the actual result feel less shitty
If you RTFA he's been selling shares steadily over the last year. This is not exactly a sudden dump.
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And 2k shares is a lot?
Oh the guy who made EA suck is now making Unity suck what a shocker
He should go work for Epic, they're really just begging to be run into the ground by a shitty CEO
Nah Sweeny might be a goof but it's nice to see a geek instead of a suit run things
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They already are.
Like laying down a mighty fart just as the elevator doors close, Unity management abandon the aircraft they were supposed to captain on their golden parachutes. The corporate money making machine continues to chug on.
As they say, trust is built in drops and lost in buckets. This guy is a fucking idiot, even by corporate douchebag standards
I wish I was a well connected idiot 😞
I’m pretty sure every moderately in touch indie developer has removed Unity from their future projects. They’ve entirely lost the trust of the community and probably can’t do anything to earn it back
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He sold 2,000 fucking options at $1.43 a piece today. The largest trade he's ever made was selling 1,899,317 units of Unity Software stock on 4 June 2020 worth over $87,615,493. On average, Mr trades about 193,001 units every 155 days since 2012.
Stop clicking on yahoo finance shit articles. List of his unity sales history: https://wallmine.com/people/85761/john-s-riccitiello
Adding to this: SEC regs for officers in public companies require them to plan and disclose trades well in advance. It's not exactly my field and I'm way too lazy to research, but it's probably like one or two quarters in advance. This is to prevent market panic and speculation exactly like the bs in this thread.
Yep, I didn't bother to include the advance disclosure requirements. Publically traded company employees with insider information are banned from trading on it (theoretically could be anyone but generally just reserved for execs who actually make enough off the dishonesty to be worth going after). Execs can't even trade in real time as the temptation is obviously too great, they have to make any buy/sell purchases of their own company a quarter in advance.
I remember rooting for Unity over Unreal because I like using C# over C++ (because smooth brain). But when he stated that if dev aren't using mobile then they are dumb (paraphrasing), I shifted to Unreal. Glad I did after seeing this shit show. Hope he gets the boot after this.
I liked using unity cause it was faster, more light weight, and had much more community based things around it. I've been mainly developing in unreal this past year due to it being a group thing, but I'm gonna be fully switching over to Godot for any personal or individual development now.
I looked at C++ code and C# code and decided to go for C# because it's actually readable for someone starting.
He already knew a long time ago that this ship is sinking... What a pity, time to learn Godot.
Not defending the CEO, but selling 2k shares mean nothing for a CEO. I believe this would be a small percentage of his bonus.
According to the article, he has sold over 50000 within the last year alone, and hasn't buy back a single one. And that's already saying something.
Still immoral. I know everyone here is arguing about SEC regulations and that fuckboy was technically within his legal rights, but I’d like to remind you all that THE LAW IS ONLY THE BARE MINIMUM FOR ACCEPTABLE HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND YOU SHOULD PROBABLY AIM WELL ABOVE IT TO NOT BE A COMPLETE SHITBAG
I don’t care about what’s legal, this was still an immoral move.
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This move is part of a larger trend for the insider, who over the past year has sold a total of 50,610 shares and purchased none.
Nothing suspicious about that.
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I mean that's only like $70,000, which I'm guessing for him isn't a huge amount of money.
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