Put yourself in a directors chair. You draw a modest salary but...

Put yourself in a directors chair.

You draw a modest salary but you have a lot of $$$ tied up in shares and options that you can basically never sell. In particular the shares - directors selling shares is a very bad look.

So if a director wants to free up cash the best way to do it is to convert the options and sell the same number of shares all in one transaction (or in quick succession) so that your overall shareholding remains unchanged.

You also don't want your trading to affect the share price too much so you need to execute your trades during high volume. Lastly you don't want the trades to seem like 'suspicious' activity, so the very best time to do it off the back of a positive announcement.

You could construct a similar argument for doing this off the back of a bad announcement - converting the oppies ready to sell as soon as the news drops (although I can't see a director actually doing that).

Overall it doesn't really indicate whether the news is good or bad (although I take it as a positive sign) but it's definitely not a conspiracy theory. It's just commence sense - it's what you or I would do in the same situation.