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[-] envis10n@lemm.ee 166 points 9 months ago

So he sells a bunch of shares right before the announcement that is likely going to tank their stock price

[-] Makhulu@geddit.social 116 points 9 months ago

We should come up with a name for such an act

[-] uzay@infosec.pub 88 points 9 months ago

We should make it illegal too!

[-] ColonelSanders@lemmy.world 35 points 9 months ago

We need to make sure we come up with a way to enforce it as well!

[-] Virkkunen@kbin.social 27 points 9 months ago

Okay, you lost me there now buddy!

[-] MxM111@kbin.social 10 points 9 months ago

It actually is. The insider sells have to be announced well in advance.

[-] ColonelSanders@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago

Psst! That was the joke!

[-] The_v@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] Dasnap@lemmy.world 10 points 9 months ago

Something catchy, like the 'buy and bail'.

[-] datelmd5sum@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago

cum and run

[-] Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 9 months ago

Cocksucking!

[-] meco03211@lemmy.world 23 points 9 months ago

Pretty sure CEOs need to jump through more hoops to sell their shares like reporting that they plan to sell.

[-] Carighan@lemmy.world 32 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] FredericChopin_@feddit.uk 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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?

[-] envis10n@lemm.ee 2 points 9 months ago

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

[-] shish_mish@lemmy.world 22 points 9 months ago

Yes that appears to be the case...

[-] cybersandwich@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] Ranvier@sopuli.xyz 9 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] Brokkr@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

Price is tanking at the opening bell while the market overall is flat or positive.

[-] Ranvier@sopuli.xyz 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[-] envis10n@lemm.ee 2 points 9 months ago

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

[-] VeracityMD@kbin.social 4 points 9 months ago

If you RTFA he's been selling shares steadily over the last year. This is not exactly a sudden dump.

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[-] learningduck@programming.dev 1 points 9 months ago

And 2k shares is a lot?

[-] chalupapocalypse@lemmy.world 149 points 9 months ago

Oh the guy who made EA suck is now making Unity suck what a shocker

[-] Ertebolle@kbin.social 30 points 9 months ago

He should go work for Epic, they're really just begging to be run into the ground by a shitty CEO

[-] chalupapocalypse@lemmy.world 23 points 9 months ago

Nah Sweeny might be a goof but it's nice to see a geek instead of a suit run things

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[-] ysjet@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago

They already are.

[-] TsarVul@lemmy.world 66 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 54 points 9 months ago

As they say, trust is built in drops and lost in buckets. This guy is a fucking idiot, even by corporate douchebag standards

[-] holycrap@lemm.ee 3 points 9 months ago

I wish I was a well connected idiot 😞

[-] BURN@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

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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[-] pdxfed@lemmy.world 44 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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

[-] solstice@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] pdxfed@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] northendtrooper@lemmy.ca 40 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] Dawn@lemmy.world 26 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] morriscox@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

I looked at C++ code and C# code and decided to go for C# because it's actually readable for someone starting.

[-] mrsgreenpotato@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 9 months ago

He already knew a long time ago that this ship is sinking... What a pity, time to learn Godot.

[-] learningduck@programming.dev 18 points 9 months ago

Not defending the CEO, but selling 2k shares mean nothing for a CEO. I believe this would be a small percentage of his bonus.

[-] sebinspace@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

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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[-] mrsgreenpotato@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] sadbehr@lemmy.nz 14 points 9 months ago

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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[-] canni@lemmy.one 13 points 9 months ago

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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this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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