JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon cashed in about $150 million of his stock in the bank — the first time the head of the largest US lender has sold shares since taking charge in 2005.
Dimon, one of the longest-serving chief executives on Wall Street, unloaded 821,778 shares of JPMorgan, according to an SEC filing Thursday.
The selloff is part of a larger plan the bank revealed in an SEC filing in October to sell 1 million of the 8.6 million shares Dimon and his family own.
A spokesperson for JPMorgan confirmed to The Post that “this was the planned sale of less than 10% of his holdings that we announced last October.”
At that time, a regulatory filing attributed Dimon’s trimming of his personal stake in JPMorgan to financial diversification and tax-planning purposes.
JPMorgan shares were up over 1%, to $183.07, in early trading Friday and the firm has a market capitalization of $527.3 billion — the largest of any US bank.
Year-to-date, JPMorgan has already seen its share price rise more than 6%.
Even after the selloff, Dimon and his family still own about 7.6 million shares in JPMorgan, which has more than $2.5 trillion under management, per the bank’s website.
Dimon “continues to believe the company’s prospects are very strong and his stake in the company will remain very significant,” JPMorgan told The Post in October after announcing his planned stock sale.
Dimon’s transactions involving JPMorgan shares are subject to the terms of Rule 10b5-1 of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, the bank told The Post, which requires insiders to sell company stock by setting up a predetermined plan that specifies a transaction date and the amount of stock to be sold.
News of Dimon’s plans sparked concerns that the 67-year-old is gearing up for retirement. In 2020, he said he was going to stick around for another five years — though the comment was made two years after he initially set the five-year goal.
However, JPMorgan has assured that the sale is not related to leadership succession.
The windfall Dimon is set to receive from his stock sale on Thursday comes just after receiving $36 million in compensation for 2023 — a 4.3% year-over-year gain.
The board granted Dimon a $1.5 million salary and $34.5 million of performance-based incentive compensation.
JPMorgan also raked in an impressive sum in 2023, posting $49.6 billion in profits — the most ever in American banking history — which was attributed to high-interest rates and its acquisition of First Republic Bank, one of three midsize lenders to fail within a span of two months, per its earnings report.
Under Dimon’s nearly two-decade reign, JPMorgan’s shares have increased some 250% — more than 10 times the gain the S&P 500 Financials Index has experienced during the same period.
When the bank experienced stock slumps throughout Dimon’s tenure, he scooped up shares using his own money in a sign of confidence amid rough patches.
Take early 2009, for example, when Dimon bought 500,000 shares of the bank during a stock slump. He made an identical move in 2016, spending a total of about $38 million on the two transactions.
JPMorgan’s success in the stock market made Dimon a billionaire in 2015, and his current net worth totals roughly $2 billion, according to Bloomberg estimates.
With Post wires.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
