Larry Ellison filed a 10b5-1 trading plan. This means he can sell 50 million Oracle shares over the next however-many-months without some SEC lawyer asking why he sold the day before earnings tanked. The plan exists because insider trading is illegal unless you schedule it in advance like a dentist appointment.
The shares are worth $7.5 billion. Ellison is worth $158 billion. He's selling 4.7% of his net worth. You know what normal people call selling 4.7% of their assets? Buying groceries.
Retail traders will spend the weekend reverse-engineering what this means for Oracle's quarterly guidance. They'll draw lines on charts. They'll check unusual options activity. They'll join Discord servers where a guy named TechLord88 explains why this is actually bullish because Ellison needs cash to buy more Hawaiian islands. None of this will help them.
The stock will do whatever it was going to do anyway. Ellison will sell his shares at whatever price the algos decide that morning. Some pension fund will buy them. The pension fund manager will file his own disclosure three months later. Another retail trader will analyze that disclosure and conclude it means Boeing is undervalued.
Here's what the trading plan tells you about Oracle's future: Larry Ellison's tax attorney suggested he diversify. That's it. That's the signal. A 79-year-old man with more money than Denmark's GDP listened to his CPA. This is the information you're using to time your Robinhood entry.
The world's seventh-richest person will sell stock using a pre-scheduled plan specifically designed to contain zero information, and thousands of people will convince themselves they cracked the code by reading the press release.
Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash
Leave a Comment