EBay Officer Exercises Options
Associated Press 07.30.07, 1:30 PM ET
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NEW YORK – The president of eBay Inc.’s PayPal, a payments processing service, exercised options for 62,500 shares of common stock and sold them under a prearranged trading plan, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
In a Form 4 filed with the SEC Friday, Rajiv Dutta reported he exercised the options Thursday for $10.02 apiece and then sold all 62,500 of them on the same day for $32.97 apiece.
The stock sale was conducted under a prearranged 10b5-1 trading plan which allows a company insider to set up a program in advance for such transactions and proceed with them even if he or she comes into possession of material non-public information.
My my… There sure has been an awful lot of insider trading from the wheels at ebay recently. All sales.
Tap tap… Is anyone out there paying attention?
Let me just draw a comparison here between what has occured before. I found where a wise poster posted this on a popular finance -related forum. From a 2002 article; “How to Spot the Next Enron“, the six talking points:
1) Watch cash flow, not reported net income.
2) Take a wary look at acquisition binges.
3) Be mindful of income-accelerating tricks.
4) Talk to customers.
5) Watch stock sales by top company executives.
6) See how CEOs handle criticism.
There are the dots. Draw your own lines. Of course that situation is not identical, there are even more dots with ebay, ie; lawsuits, gov’t action, ongoing litigations.
I do not claim to have an MBA or anything, but while the raw numbers are going down, (oops, I take that back, ebay listing fees are up ) we see that ebay reported a 50% increase in profit during Q10 – 2007? I won’t even pretend to have sifted through all the numbers, but does that defy common sense? Could it be creative bookkeeping? How much of paypal’s reported profit is actually in the form of it’s users frozen accounts?
And yet the head honchos are selling their stock options like there is no tomorrow? Does it seem like they have faith in ebay? Is there something they know that everyone else does not?
Draw your own conclusions.
Getting back to the subject of the ebay finance related boards at Google and Yahoo; Beware of fake persuaders and paid shills. They are real, they have been used before. And man, oh man! Are they ever busy these days!
Not only “pumping” on the finance bds, but on ebay community boards defelecting and denying as well (as they have been since around 2001)
Couple quick likely ways to spot them;
Do they know the difference between ebay being hacked, and googlehacks?
Do they come back in a grumpy mood when someone posts a link to Doc’s ebaymotorssucks.com, claiming the site does not work? (after seeing something hilarious?)
