When a director of an ASX 200 stock, tech or not, sells millions of dollars worth of their own company's shares, it tends not to go unnoticed.
ASX investors like to see the insiders and directors of the companies that they are highly paid to run align themselves as much as possible, financially speaking, with investors.
As such, you will often see a positive reaction from markets when it comes out that a director or insider is increasing their stakes in the companies they are running. But conversely, those same investors generally don't like to see a director or insider sell down their stakes.
Unfortunately, it's the latter scenario that shareholders of ASX 200 tech stock SiteMinder Ltd (ASX: SDR) are confronting today.
Hotel and accommodation services provider SiteMinder released an ASX filing yesterday. This filing revealed that non-executive director Les Szekely had sold the vast majority of his shares of the ASX 200 tech stock.
ASX insider unloads $85 million of ASX 200 tech stock
The ASX notice informed investors that Szekely, who was reportedly SiteMinder's "first angel investor", will retire from his position by the end of the 2024 calendar year. At the same time, it was revealed that Szekely has "reduced" his shareholding of SiteMinder from 15.5 million shares to 1.5 million shares.
According to the release, "this decision was made by Les to allow him to refocus his time and resources towards his passion for technology startup opportunities".
Szekely personally added the following:
My decision to reduce my shareholding in SiteMinder and retire from my position as a Non-Executive Director of the company allows me to continue participating in the success of SiteMinder as a supportive shareholder, while also allowing me to refocus my attention on my life-long passion for growing up-and-coming technology startups – just as SiteMinder once was.
According to the ASX filing of the sale, Szekely sold 114 million shares from his Meyer Family Trust in an on-market trade on 30 September last week. The sale was executed at an average price of $6.10 per share, resulting in Szekely banking a cool $85.4 million.
At the time of writing, the SiteMinder share price is down significantly in today's trading. So investors potentially have Szekely to thank for this dip. The ASX 200 tech stock has lost a chunky 2.3% of its value and is down to $6.18 a share.
As we touched on earlier, Szekely retains approximately 1.55 million SiteMinder shares. This stake in the ASX 200 tech stock would have a value of around $9.57 million at present pricing. So we can't exactly argue that Szekely has completely checked out of SiteMinder.
