HP’s Very Good Year (so far)

It’s been a very good year for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and more specifically its investors: year to date, the stock is up about 125% and the stock rose 5% today on positive earnings. In this CNBC interview, CEO Antonio Neri celebrated what he called “record results”. So perhaps a disclosure in the 10-Q that they filed earlier today shouldn’t be that surprising.

As you can hopefully see from the chart, five named executives have entered into new 10b5 plans at various points in June. (If you can’t see the chart, it’s on page 63 of the 10-Q). Three of those plans — for Marie Myers, Antonio Neri and Neil MacDonald — expire at the end of this year while two others expire in 2027.

What caught my attention here is that at “up to 750,000 shares”, Neri’s planned sale appears to be his largest since companies began disclosing 10b5 plans in their 10Qs three years ago. Indeed, the sales have been slowly ratcheting up. In the 2025 10-K filed in mid-December, Neri had disclosed a plan to sell up to 441,000 shares through June 2026. Before that, it was two 500,000 planned sales under plans in 2024.

According to the most recent proxy, Neri owned 2.1 million shares as of Dec. 31. But since then, there’s been two additional sales — one in March and a second in April — from an earlier 10b5 plan, reducing his holdings to around 1.7 million shares. As a result, if he does sell 750,000 shares by the end of this year, it will effectively reduce his stake in the company by over 40%.

I don’t mean to imply there’s anything wrong with this. As is common for this type of disclosure, there’s no real reason given in the Q on why Neri chose that number of shares. Was it tax planning? Diversification? Paying for a kids’ college tuition? There’s none of that detail. I should also note that at least two other executives — EVP Rami Rahim and Myers disclosed plans that will see them sell off similar stakes over the course of their 10b5 plans.

At current prices, assuming Neri sells those 750,000 shares, it works out to around $41 million.