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Apple CEO Tim Cook Sells Another $28.7 Million in Stock
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You're assuming the common sense and ability to reason was ever there in the first place. You know the old stories about the million monkeys with the typewriters? They gave up on Shakespeare and switched to hating Apple a while back.
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Could be a lot of reasons he is selling the stock, personal and corporate finance can be complicated and maybe the timing is just a coincidence. At the same time, I have little faith in removing all your ports from devices just to make them thinner and prettier.. one port on my MacBook totally sucks. One port on the iPhone will also totally suck.
No. CEOs can only sell stock at certain points. They must file to do so months in advance.
Those that believe these sales are related to upcoming announcements have zero understanding of how these stock sales work.
If Tim was unloading because of upcoming announcements and a drop in stock price, it'd be pretty stupid to unload less than $100 million of it when he has over $800 million worth of stock.
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Werd. Zuckerberg has done the same, as did Jobs, as did Gates, and countless other CEOs. This is a very normal thing to do. Stock can't be used to buy things. At some point you need to cash it out if you want to actually buy anything. It does you no good invested forever.
Tim's stock options being vested means he can either hold them (and hope the value goes up) or sell them. He has kept some but sold a lot. When someone dumps the stock like this it is percieved as a show of no faith in the company and/or no faith that the stock value will increase. When Jobs came back/Apple purchased NeXT they gave him a bunch of Apple stock, which he sold the next day...because he had zero faith in Apples ability to turn around. Mostly because he wasnt in charge and I think that was his message. Cook just wants the money which probably means he has plans for something or sees the future products and isn't willing to gamble. Either way, Apple doesnt mean the same to him as it did Jobs....so he will likley move on at some point and follow his real passions...with his giant pile of cash. For the record....I would have cashed it all out and said see ya later. Buy a cheap house and live the rest of my life in retirement.
Thanks Capt. Obvious, but I never put my name on the ballot.
This is a forum of opinions. You're welcome to yours, as am I to mine.
It's clear that Apple has been setting up for privacy as a differentiating feature for years now (I first noticed it in iOS 7 I think it was with MAC address randomization for wifi and bluetooth radios). It's good business, and good policy. Win-win regardless of motive.
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He still has 110M in stock.
Some of you people get so dramatic over shares selling, you realize he's going to get just as much stock in bonuses over the next couple of years anyway? Cook is going to be CEO for years (if the decision remains up to him), this is clear to everyone who actually pays attention to the way he speaks.
He's also been telling me he has amazing products in the pipeline for years....yet all we get is boring updates. So clearly he is full of hot air. And honestly, he is the CEO of Apple.....he is not going to sound like he is leaving...no matter what his plans. Lets just see how much he takes over the next year.
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The Apple fan base does not recognize this as fact. They can not conceive of the reality of it being true. Best to deny it and listen to the CEO who is under a gag order.
Agreed. He's not a bad CEO at all. He doesn't have the distinction of being Steve Jobs. And for entirely too many out there, it makes him an automatic failure held to an unfair standard.
Boo hoo.
Product pipelines don't move at the schizophrenic pace that people (read: wall street) expect these days. Not when you're trying to get a product right anyway.
He is trash in the mind of little people because he is successful and wealthy. This is not acceptable because it is not fair for someone with talent, ambition and a relentless work ethic to become richly compensated.
Envy is the worst of all sins.
Every item you own has value. Just because you can't take it to the store and buy something directly with it doesn't change the value that it holds. Stock just like anything else can be liquidated and turned into cash that you can use to purchase goods.
Ridiculous. You have it backwards. Tim sold SOME of his stock and kept MOST of it. As in enough that he could get close to a billion by the time the remaining stock has vested.
And he can't cash it all out. He has to file ahead of time to sell. And he has even more shares that vest every year for the next 5 years. Worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Apple stock price hasn't moved significantly at all after both announcements that Cook sold stock. That's because those who hold stock know full well Tims sale has NOTHING to do with how he thinks Apple will do or what the iPhone 7 is like.
Who cares if it's altruistic or not, that for his benefit. I care about what the actions and results are for the users (Apple's or others even) at the end of the day. He stood firm and is opening up a privacy fight with the tech world that has been long overdue since the ironically named Patriot Act.
The whole PRISM inclusion on the powerpoint has been discussed many times in details and info from Snowden himself, search the forum on it...In any case, they've been hailed for their security and privacy implementations in their technology by the most respected in the world of cryptography (Bruce Schneir) and security (long list...)
To clear up some apparent confusion about insider trading rules: Insiders, to include CEOs, do not have to notify the SEC in advance that they are going to trade stock. They do however have to notify the SEC, through publicly accessible filings, within 2 days after they trade stock.
Further, they don't actually have to have trading plans indicating that they are going to buy or sell shares on a given date in order to do so. There isn't a legal requirement that they have such trading plans. A CEO could, e.g., wake up this morning and decide to sell shares in their company and in selling them wouldn't necessarily be in violation of the law. However, because of how insider trading laws work - to include how they have been interpreted by courts and the SEC - there's a very good chance that they would be opening themselves up to criminal liability if they were to do that. So, speaking practically, they need to have trading plans and only trade stock based on the conditions they specified ahead of time in those plans.
Those trading plans provide legal cover against accusations that an insider traded based on material nonpublic information. But the rules regarding such plans are lax enough such that, if one was so inclined, they could sometimes skirt legal liability for what would otherwise be illegal trades. Such plans do not have to be filed with the SEC and they can be amended. And while the existence of such plans for particular individuals is often noted, e.g. in SEC filings, the details of such plans are usually not disclosed. Further, speaking practically again, planned trades can be canceled without consequences.
There is no requirement that trades have to be planned through such trading plans a certain amount of time in advance. They could be planned (or the conditions which would trigger them could be specified) days or months or years in advance. But in order to provide the legal cover that they are meant to provide, plans to trade should be made at a time when the insider doesn't have material nonpublic information which won't be public by the time the trades are made. That's the theory anyway, how things work in practice can be quite different. The reality is that a CEO will always have what amounts to material nonpublic information. That's why they need these kinds of plans, so that their trades aren't made based on such information until after it has become public. Of course, by that time they likely have other material nonpublic information, but the idea is that they can't be trading on that newer information because they didn't have it at the time they made the decision to trade. I'd say even that is a bit niave as the nature of some forms of material nonpublic information is such that it's quite long lived.
All that said, having followed Mr. Cook's actions as an executive of Apple for quite a while - and having regularly read the various SEC filings for Mr. Cook and other Apple executives for quite a while - I don't for one minute think the timing of these trades was driven by his expectations for Apple's stock performance going forward. As I suggested, trading plans can be used as cover for trades driven by such expectations and based improperly on insider information. But I don't feel that's what's happened here. I would say the same with regard to Mr. Riccio's recent trades. They're fairly consistent with how he's handled vested RSUs in the past, though the history of his RSU grants and subsequent trades is a bit more convoluted. He doesn't usually hold on to much stock for long periods, but also doesn't always sell all of his vesting stock the very next day. Sometimes the trades come a week or a month later.
Further, they don't actually have to have trading plans indicating that they are going to buy or sell shares on a given date in order to do so. There isn't a legal requirement that they have such trading plans. A CEO could, e.g., wake up this morning and decide to sell shares in their company and in selling them wouldn't necessarily be in violation of the law. However, because of how insider trading laws work - to include how they have been interpreted by courts and the SEC - there's a very good chance that they would be opening themselves up to criminal liability if they were to do that. So, speaking practically, they need to have trading plans and only trade stock based on the conditions they specified ahead of time in those plans.
Those trading plans provide legal cover against accusations that an insider traded based on material nonpublic information. But the rules regarding such plans are lax enough such that, if one was so inclined, they could sometimes skirt legal liability for what would otherwise be illegal trades. Such plans do not have to be filed with the SEC and they can be amended. And while the existence of such plans for particular individuals is often noted, e.g. in SEC filings, the details of such plans are usually not disclosed. Further, speaking practically again, planned trades can be canceled without consequences.
There is no requirement that trades have to be planned through such trading plans a certain amount of time in advance. They could be planned (or the conditions which would trigger them could be specified) days or months or years in advance. But in order to provide the legal cover that they are meant to provide, plans to trade should be made at a time when the insider doesn't have material nonpublic information which won't be public by the time the trades are made. That's the theory anyway, how things work in practice can be quite different. The reality is that a CEO will always have what amounts to material nonpublic information. That's why they need these kinds of plans, so that their trades aren't made based on such information until after it has become public. Of course, by that time they likely have other material nonpublic information, but the idea is that they can't be trading on that newer information because they didn't have it at the time they made the decision to trade. I'd say even that is a bit niave as the nature of some forms of material nonpublic information is such that it's quite long lived.
All that said, having followed Mr. Cook's actions as an executive of Apple for quite a while - and having regularly read the various SEC filings for Mr. Cook and other Apple executives for quite a while - I don't for one minute think the timing of these trades was driven by his expectations for Apple's stock performance going forward. As I suggested, trading plans can be used as cover for trades driven by such expectations and based improperly on insider information. But I don't feel that's what's happened here. I would say the same with regard to Mr. Riccio's recent trades. They're fairly consistent with how he's handled vested RSUs in the past, though the history of his RSU grants and subsequent trades is a bit more convoluted. He doesn't usually hold on to much stock for long periods, but also doesn't always sell all of his vesting stock the very next day. Sometimes the trades come a week or a month later.
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Oh please don't buy into that silly comment. He's not calling him trash for any good reason, he's just anxious that his next iPhone isn't going to be as "cool" as he wants it to be and is lashing out.