Insider Watch: First Solar CEO Unloads Millions In Stock (FSLR)

As part of a 10b5-1 trading plan, First Solar Inc. (NASDAQ: FSLR) has seen its CEO Michael Ahearn unload roughly 250,000 shares of common stock.  As of the last filing, he still held some 3,073,839 shares of First Solar common stock.

While an insider sell of 250,000 shares isn’t normally a big sale elsewhere, it represents a larger number than most people will ever see in their lifetimes.  First Solar shares closed down almost 5% today at $295.90.  At that price this represents nearly $74 million worth of common stock.   But his share sale prices came mostly north of $305.00 per share on May 15 and May 16, so the amount of funds raised was probably closer to $77 million.

We looked these up on data in the SEC Filings database, which you can compare.  We suggest that you do, because sometimes these are only released a portion at a time.

Normally we do not care about share sales under an executive’s planned share sale trading plan.  But when it comes to $77 million worth of stock and when it is after a 400% run over a year is hard not to notice.

If you are worried that Ahearn may be getting out all of his stock, it isn’t even close to that.  With more than 3 million shares still held as of the last filing we saw, Mr. Ahearn still holds close to $1 Billion worth of stock.

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Jon C. Ogg
May 19, 2008

Jon Ogg produces and edits the "10 Stocks Under $10" newsletter and he does not own securities in the companies he covers.