A longtime Nvidia Corp. board member sold $25 million in stock earlier this week, although that represented just a small fraction of his sizable holdings.
Mark Stevens unloaded 21,500 Nvidia shares
NVDA,
Monday at an average price of $468.08, and sold another 30,675 shares Tuesday at an average price of $489.91, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission released Wednesday.
Stevens’s sales, which were done through a trust he shares with his wife, came after Nvidia reported blowout earnings last week. Nvidia’s shares secured a record close this Wednesday, having surged 238% so far this year.
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The managing partner of S-Cubed Capital, a family-office investment firm, Stevens has been on Nvidia’s board since 2008, and he also served on the board from 1993 to 2006.
Accordingly, he owns a sizeable amount of Nvidia’s stock. Stevens holds just over 1 million Nvidia shares in one trust, nearly 2 million Nvidia shares in another trust, and a further 1.3 million shares via direct ownership, according to Wednesday’s filing.
FactSet listed Stevens as the second-largest insider or stakeholder owner of Nvidia shares as of June, behind Chief Executive Jensen Huang.
Stevens also sold just over $51 million in stock in June, joining a couple other board members in doing so.
While the size of Stevens’s position has come down in recent years, its value has ballooned alongside the meteoric rise in the price of Nvidia shares.
The roughly 4.3 million remaining shares owned by Stevens are worth more than $2.1 billion, according to Ben Silverman, the research director at VerityData, which tracks insider buying and selling data. In November 2015, Stevens owned 8.3 million Nvidia shares that were worth $64.4 million.
Silverman said that the recent insider selling at Nvidia “is not unusual.”
“There’s been insider selling at [Nvidia] every quarter since the beginning of 2014, when the stock was trading under $5.00,” he said in emailed comments. “With the massive revaluation of the stock this year we expect insiders will continue to generate liquidity from their stock-based compensation and in cases like Stevens, long-held shares.”
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Meanwhile, Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress unloaded 4,980 shares of Nvidia Monday at prices ranging from $451.54 to $468.39. Her sales, amounting to about $2.3 million, came through a 10b5-1 trading plan that she adopted in March 2022.
Executives and board members can set up trading plans that trigger sales based on certain future conditions, like timing and price levels. These let insiders make stock transactions while avoiding the appearance that they’re trading based on current business information about the company.
Silverman said that Kress’s latest sale “was not price-oriented.”
Nvidia declined to comment when asked if the company, Stevens or Kress had comment on the recently disclosed sales.
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