He sold about 500,000 shares. He owned, apparently, 3.3% of the 17.06 million total shares of the company, meaning he had a little over 562,000 shares. He sold almost all of his shares. That doesn't exactly exude confidence in future growth, IMO.
News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
Sounds like something a greedy little pigboy would do
Lol, if only someone, or like, thousands of someones, warned the others and this. Shame. Anyway...
ahahahahahahahahaha
Spez proving almost everyone else right.
On the other hand, he already cashed out once and was wrong, so...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Huffman
The site's audience grew rapidly in its first few months, and by August 2005, Huffman noticed their habitual user-base had grown so large that he no longer needed to fill the front page with content himself.[11][14][15] Huffman and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast on October 31, 2006, for a reported $10 million to $20 million.[3][16] Huffman remained with Reddit until 2009, when he left his role as acting CEO.[17]
Huffman spent several months backpacking in Costa Rica[18] before co-creating the travel website Hipmunk with Adam Goldstein, an author and software developer, in 2010. Funded by Y Combinator,[19][20] Hipmunk launched in August 2010[21] with Huffman serving as CTO.[22] In 2011, Inc. named Huffman to its 30 under 30 list.[22]
In 2014, Huffman said that his decision to sell Reddit had been a mistake, and that the site's growth had exceeded his expectations.[23] On July 10, 2015, Reddit hired Huffman as CEO following the resignation of Ellen Pao[24] and during a particularly difficult time for the company.[25] Upon rejoining the company, Huffman's top goals included launching Reddit's iOS and Android apps, fixing Reddit's mobile website, and creating A/B testing infrastructure.[3]
Since returning to Reddit, Huffman instituted a number of technological changes including an updated mobile site and stronger infrastructure, as well as new content guidelines.
I don't think that he's had a whole lot of faith in Reddit as a business since early-on.
Huffman’s top goals included launching Reddit’s iOS and Android apps
Mission accomplished! Those undeniably shitty apps definitely were launched.
I've never used them, but IIRC they acquired some third-party client and then just modified them. "Blue Alien" or something like that?
googles
"Alien Blue", at least for the official iOS app.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Blue
I dunno what the history of the Android app is.
That being said, they're responsible for what they acquire, just saying that a lot of that might not be developed in-house.
They acquired Alien Blue, but what they put out under “Reddit” was not Alien Blue in the least bit. They basically bought it to kill it. I had Alien Blue. :(
According to the second link, he sold nearly all of his class A shares, but none of his class B shares. His total share of the company went from 3.2% to 2.6%, which, is still not insignificant.
Question: why was Apollo killed?
Answer: Spez wanted $16 million dollars
It was not just Apollo, there were other good clients too like Sync for Reddit.
I've given up on buying stocks for individual companies. I'd rather just stuff it in an index fund and pretend it doesn't exist for 10 years.
the average person usually doesnt beat the average index fund, so if you arent keen at day trading, dont do it.
No one is "keen" at day trading, some people get lucky and think they're talented. The vast majority lose money because the big players make sure of it.
It's literally just gambling, but nobody looks at a guy who won $50k at blackjack and says "hey I can make a career out of that."
If you have the money to spend/blow, the "correct" approach is to:
- Put the vast majority if your money into stable investments. Index funds, bonds, etc. You should have a retirement fund with at least one of the major companies (I have had good experience with Vanguard and Fidelity) and they can help with that. This is for retirement and the like.
- Put a VERY small amount into "one off" purchases of various stocks. Stuff like "I think this apple computers might take off some day" kind of purchases. This is not a retirement fund. This is gambling. But it still might mean you have money for a kitchen remodel or a rainy day.
But if you don't have money to "throw away"? Do not buy individual stocks. Or crypto. Or anything other than what you need to have a life after you age out of the workforce because late stage capitalism.
So the IPO was Thursday; on Monday:
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman sold 500,000 shares ... at an average $32.30 price, receiving $16.15 million.
CFO Vollero Andrew sold 71,765 Reddit shares for $2.318 million.
Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Wong sold 514,000 shares for $16.602 million.
Chief Technology Officer Christopher Slowe sold 185,000 shares for $5.975 million.
Chief Accounting Officer Michelle Reynolds sold 3,033 RDDT shares for $97,966.
Board member David Habiger sold 3,000 shares for $102,000.All told, that's $41.245 million worth of Reddit shares sold.
I knew they were going to sell as soon as they could, but damn. As someone who knows the bare basics of how it all works but does NOT actually follow the stock market, the last time I saw that kind of executive dumping was Enron just before it went under, lol.
Can someone who actually follows the markets tell me whether all the social media/tech IPO C-suites do that these days, or is this genuinely unusual? Because honestly I find the sales a bit shocking in both rapidity and amount, even for as greedy and openly corrupt as the Reddit board has been over the last few years.
EDITED TO ADD: Apparently this is not so unusual. Many thanks to those who took the time to answer.
From my experience, these people have lots more shares than what they sold. And aside from spez, it's not really that much.
If I am not mistaken, these sales are also planned and public knowledge before the sales are executed. The key shareholders should know executives are going to dump stock.
But yes. This seems normal to me.
One thing of note is the average price spez sold for. That is actually below market value so it's likely that his sale price was fixed, which I believe is a thing.
Yes. Insiders with that high a fraction of ownership exercise the ability to sell shares at a predetermined percentage value of a full priced share. Usually pegged to the closing price at the beginning or end of a quarter, whichever is lower.
Some of these people have been with Reddit since the very beginning and this is basically their first practical chance to sell any of their shares - I wouldn't read too much into their activity this week. For a company valued at $9B, having the founder & other executives only sell $41M in the week of the IPO if anything feels like the opposite of dumping.
I was thinking short sellers looking to profit would buy up as much as they could to make a bubble then short sell once the market started going sideways, and this chart seems to accurately reflect that:
Shares "dove" to $50, which is still about $49 too high
Anything that keeps them listed on the exchange is too high honestly
If you want to have a laugh at how ridiculous the whole market is, Trump's Truth Social just IPOed and has the same market cap as Reddit even though it's much smaller and full of insane people.
To be fair, Truth Social has a userbase who have proudly declared that they are rubes ripe for further grift.
Gee it is almost like completely alienating your user base is a bad for profits?
They dumped $50 million the same week as the IPO? Talk about confidence in your company!
Also, they didn’t have any lockout period? That’s also bullshit. I worked for a company during an IPO some years back and nobody could sell their shares for something like a year!
I won't lie, I do regret not making a quick buck off of it. I could have gotten in at 30-something and out at 40-something easily enough.
I just couldn't stomach the thought of buying RDDT. I also guessed Pigboy Spez and his pals would leave us suckers holding the bag.
Turns out some brave peasants did make money on the IPO. Just not this peasant.
I suspect the stock will spiral down from here.
I bought put options on Monday. So far the stock is doing exactly what I thought it would do. I expect to see it at 25 a share before they expire in a few months.
Anyone who bought that shit deserves to lose all their money.
Nothing made me wanting to spend time and effort generating free content more then the IPO.
Make your own damn money.
Spez will probably quit within a year or two.
I feel like he is Ellen Pao-ing himself now.
His purpose is to implement all of the unpopular shit, take off with his golden parachute, and then a new CEO steps up promising better mod tools and maybe better performance in the mobile app. They'll make the users think Reddit is headed in a positive new direction with Huffman gone, even though all of it has been preordained and effectively nothing will change, but at least the users will have their bread and circuses.
Man I wish I had had the capacity to short the stock so much.
Rats cashing out before it swirls down the drain
IPOs are cash outs these days