Sirius XM (NASDAQ:SIRI) Management’s Big Stock Sales

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published

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There are two ways to look at management’s sales of millions of shares in Sirius XM (NASDAQ:SIRI). One is that the executives saved the company from an almost certain bankruptcy and deserve a pay day for that. The other is that the people running Sirius believe that the stock has peaked.

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, the top five officers at Sirius plan to sell shares they have received as they vest. The total of the grants is 10 million shares which vest over 40 weeks. The executives have already sold seven million shares worth $3.2 million.

There is a reasonable argument that Sirius shares have peaked, at least for the period between now and when the company releases its next set of earnings. Sirius stock currently trades about where it did in May, around $.58. The shares had a brief run to $.78 in August, but for five months the price has been relatively flat.

That leaves the question of what management’s successful attempt to save the company is worth. Sirius shares traded as low as $.05 in mid-February so they are up about 12-fold since then. That has added about $2 billion to the firm’s market cap and has saved many investors from watching their holdings go to zero.

Sirius trades 50 million shares a day, so the market can easily absorb the sales by the firm’s management. A few million dollars is not much to pay for keeping Sirius from drowning.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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