Although the Appen Ltd (ASX: APX) share price has pushed higher on Friday, it looks set to finish the week around 3.5% lower than where it started it.
This is largely due to a 7% decline on Thursday offsetting the gains it made earlier in the week.
Why did the Appen share price drop lower this week?
The sizeable decline on Thursday appears to have been triggered by a change of director's interest notice which was released after the market close on Wednesday.
That notice revealed that the company's chief executive officer and managing director, Mark Brayan, has offloaded 100,000 Appen shares through a series of on-market trades between June 5 and June 12.
According to the notice, the chief executive of the global leader in the development of high-quality, human-annotated datasets for machine learning and artificial intelligence received an average of $26.576 per share. This works out to be a total consideration of $2,657,600.
Why did the Appen CEO sell shares?
Accompanying the notice was a note from the company explaining the reason behind the sizeable share sale.
It said that Mr Brayan sold the shares in order "to satisfy tax obligations and to diversify personal investments."
It also pointed out that the fast-growing company's leader "continues to hold 404,414 shares in the Company directly and indirectly and has 442,583 performance rights available subject to meeting vesting conditions."
Mr Brayan isn't the only tech executive selling shares this week. On Wednesday Afterpay Touch Group Ltd (ASX: APT) confirmed that the sell down of shares by Anthony Eisen, Nicholas Molnar, and David Hancock was successful.
These executives sold 2.05 million, 2.05 million, and 0.4 million shares, respectively, to Tiger Management and Woodson Capital at $23.00 per share.
And late last month Rod Drury sold 2 million Xero Limited (ASX: XRO) shares for a total of $116 million shares via an on-market trade.
