BlackRock (NYSE: BLK), the world’s largest asset manager with more than $11.5 trillion in assets under management (AUM), has seen the single biggest insider sale on December 4, 2024.
Specifically, regulatory filings show that Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, sold 48,700 BLK shares at an average transaction price of $1,035.76. The sale, Fink’s largest to date, raised just over $50 million.
Despite the size of the sale, Larry Fink still retains a total of 295,090 BlackRock shares, worth $315 million at press time on December 13, 2024.
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Biggest BlackRock stock insider sales of 2024
BlackRock CEO’s latest insider sale is also noteworthy as it accounts for about 40% of his total BLK stock offloading in 2024.
Fink took his stake to the market three times since January: on February 23, May 20, and August 6.
These three earlier sales were all roughly equal, and the total number of sales sold ranged between 29,450 and 30,978, while the proceeds from the insider activity were between $24.8 million and $25.08 million.
Interestingly, prior to the December 4 filing, the biggest BlackRock insider sale was not executed by Fink but by Senior Managing Director Rachel Lord, who, on February 23, dumped 36,059 shares at an average price of $818.06 for a total of $29.5 million.
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Why did Larry Fink sell $50 million worth of BLK shares in December
A possible explanation for the extreme size of Fink’s latest sale could be the strong performance BlackRock stock has been experiencing in recent months.
BLK shares are a total of 33.35% in the green year-to-date (YTD), but are, with a press time price of $1,067.23, also up 35.06% since the clearly discernible start of the ongoing rally in early July.
This relatively recent uptrend can be linked to numerous factors, including the overall strength of U.S. equities, Federal Reserve’s move toward interest rate cuts, and BlackRock’s increasing exposure to Bitcoin (BTC) – another asset that has seen a veritable price explosion in 2024 and, in particular, since the start of November.
By December 8, BlackRock was the world’s fourth-largest BTC holder, with the total value of managed cryptocurrency amounting to nearly $521 billion, per a Finbold report from the day.
Still, Bitcoin accounts for only a fraction of the giant’s total holdings with equities being the largest class in the third quarter (Q3) at nearly $6.3 trillion, and fixed income securities being the second at about $3 trillion.
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