[cletus]

This move is a little strange. It's a big chunk to sell all at once and some will interpret it as a de facto vote of no confidence in MSFT.

The smoother way for executives to sell their substantial holdings in a company is to say they will sell X shares per year for Y years (typically in the name of diversifying one's holdings) and then put some independent third party (with no access to insider information) in charge of the exact timing of the individual transactions.

[msmith]

Well, he'll be saving $65M in capital gains taxes by selling this year before the rate increases to 20%. No doubt that was a consideration.

[writetoalok]

Not if he invests in other stock that he could sell afterwards.

[Dbug]

Microsoft is less secretive about new products than a company like Apple, and with such large fairly constant revenue from things like Windows and Office, the shipment or degree of success of their other products doesn't seem likely to be that big a factor in near future price of the stock. External market conditions, like the state of the economy and trends with competitors seem to matter much more. The short term impact of Win phone 7 will be more one of mood than the bottom line. They're competing with a free smartphone OS limiting licensing revenue and it would take a substantial market share for search/ad revenue to matter much. Without a huge pool of touch apps and trained users, any non-desktop-binary running tablets would see a much slower adoption rate than the iPad is experiencing and even then what they could get would only capture a small slice of the selling price. And not really being something new, it's hard to see much in the way of surprises from licensing revenue for tablets that are Windows-desktop binary compatible. It seems the innovation there won't be from MS, but primarily from lower power Intel chips making them more viable. And even then, to be hugely popular with consumers, they'd have to be at a not so profitable price point. They'd also be mostly cannibalizing netbook/laptop sales to users bonded to Windows.

The sales don't seem likely to be tied to insider info, but may be viewed as an admission of agreement with the ho-hum view of most outsiders.

[rrhyne]

The insider selling to buying ratio has been over 2000 in recent weeks. This is likely less of a dire sign of MSFT's prospects than it is a condemnation of the US economy after Heli Ben's QE2.

I bet he pumps it into commodities, metals and markets like brazil that aren't devaluing their currencies.

[barrkel]

Why do you think metals, Brazilian markets etc are a better store of value than MS stock? Why would you expect QE to affect MS stock as a store of value? In what circumstances would MS stock intrinsic value decrease but world commodity prices hold up, if not a business failure of MS itself?

[rrhyne]

MSFT is not immune to economic downturn especially a crash called by a currency crisis. The FED is currently walking a currency crisis tightrope.

As for value stores, look at the performance of the Brazilian market over the last few years and gold and silver.

Worse, if we have a currency crisis here the entire equities market is toast. The people who called this depression (Schiff, Denniger, etc) are calling for a currency crisis due to the fed's actions.

[alextp]

To be honest, a devaluing currency is precisely what you want to invest in a country, as it makes exports from that country way cheaper.

[rrhyne]

That's the 10,000 foot view of an entire economy, not a man trying to peg the top of an artificially inflated market.

[jfager]

Yeah, because nothing says "I condemn the devaluing of this currency" like asking for 1.5 billion of it right as said devaluing is happening.

[rrhyne]

So you think because he sold his stock he has to keep the dollars he got for it?

[jfager]

So you think because he can turn around and buy something else with the dollars he just got, he's not taking a risk by passing through an actively devaluing currency?

[rrhyne]

If you were afraid of a falling dollar how long would you keep your assets in dollars?