No one tell former Vice President Al Gore that it’s a bad time to buy AAPL. He just exercised a big chunk of his Apple stock options, walking off with $29 million worth of shares at a steep discount.
According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Al Gore exercised options to purchase $59,000 shares of AAPL for just pennies on the dollar.
Right now, at APPL’s current stock price of just $498.52 (down from a $700 high last year), those shares would cost around $29 million. Al Gore, however, got them for just $7.475 a share, or around $441,000 for the whole bundle.
Quite the steep discount, but Al Gore, a longtime board member of Apple, Inc. is entitled. With Apple’s earnings set to be reported next week, Gore’s move might prove a canny one. Apple’s stock is perceived by many right now as being chronically undervalued by Wall Street. Moreover, Apple share price tends to plummet before earnings announcements, only to rise afterwards.
Via: CNET
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
16 responses to “Al Gore Buys $29 Million Worth Of Apple Stock Ahead Of Next Week’s Earnings”
Well when you invent the internet, you have a pretty good track record
Well played, Mr. Gore. Well played.
AAPL is an incredible value even if you aren’t a board member. With a P/E ratio of elevenish and over $130B in cash reserves this stock is a no-brainer. AAPL is still dominant in their respective markets, this is a great short term as well as long term play.
Or not. Given that he’s on the Board this could open up claims of insider trading if there is any possibility that the Board has any information about how that earnings call is going to come out, upcoming products that could push the stock value up in the very near future etc. Particularly with it this close to the call. Hopefully there’s a grant date/deadline at play so he can claim that he had no real choice to cash it in now or he could find himself being looked at very closely in not nice ways.
Thank goodness there were all those “analysts” reports that made the stock drop like a rock.
This could mean things actually look BAD for the stock. Many times when an executive or board member exercises options they do not actually BUY the shares. They instead do a “cashless” exercise, which means the company exercises the option on the exec or board member’s behalf, buying the shares for them at the lower option price and simultaneously selling the shares at their higher market value, giving the net cash profit to the executive. The executive never really takes delivery of the shares, although technically for an instant they owned the shares. It could be he wanted to lock in the profit he had in the options in case Apple’s stock declines further.
It’s obvious there has been heavy analyst manipulation of late, pushing personal agendas, even WSJ seems in on it. When WSJ starts publishing ‘anonymous’ insider reports, such as component purchases, it’s time to Gibbs slap someone on the head.
this man claimed to invent the internet.
Like that will ever happen. The 1% have turned out economy into a perpetual wealth transfer machine; transferring it up at a rather large disproportionate amount compared with that going down.
Excellent decision Mr. Vice President. Had I been in your shoes I would have done no different.
He spent 50 cents. He brought in $30. Talk about a profit!
Wow didn’t you guys know? Apple’s going to DIE with out Steve they sold like 50 iPhone’s over christmas WSJ said so.
Something tells me that by looking at his face…he is part of the illuminati.
Something tells me that by looking at his face…he is part of the illuminati.
If he was trying to lock in profit against further decline he would have done the cashless exercise you pointed out that he didn’t do. Because when you just buy there is no guarantee on sell price after the moment you act. You lose like everyone else.
Doesn’t really matter since his price was locked in ages ago.