As per @Jeremiah S post with very telling charts on Corp insiders selling (link here), i did a whole analysis & presentation on this at end of 2019 going into 2020 on what "big business"' really thinks of the so called "booming economy" standing at the end of the longest expansion on record. spoiler alert - while corporates were buying it (literally via record buybacks), executives themselves weren't buying it (also literally), they were very much selling it.

2018-19 saw a surge in CEO turnover to record high executives stepping down. over that same period, corps held record buybacks. See this key chart below from data i compiled (obviously not updated for the past 1+ year).

Whats going on above? CEOs, who have been receiving ever growing % of their personal compensation in stock options and thus incentivized to pump up their share prices, realize that an end of cycle slowdown is at the doorstep and the "E" in P/E ratio is no longer going to contribute to their personal net worth growing - but since when do earnings fundamentals have anything to do with stock prices. So CEOs authorize massive buybacks using FCF and/or debt, pump up their personal net worth, and step down en masse, selling their stock options as they do. Yes, on one hand, they tell shareholders that the best use of their cash is to buy back shares, and even if shares are at all time highs, are apparently still enough of a... (More)