Comment Re:Speculated at for over a year (Score 1) 331
Officers of the company (i.e. insiders) would naturally want to exercise their options at the highest price possible. Increasing dividends makes the stock appear more attractive to institutional investors.
When institutions buy, that increases the pressure for the price to go up (retail investors don't move a market cap like this, only the big boys do). When the price per share goes up then that's more money that the officers can collect when they exercise their free options; in this case it looks like all the strikes were no higher than around $100. Or they simply sell some of their common position into the open market. The higher the stock price, the higher the profit. Tax strategies play a huge part too.
Any decent financial site will list insider transactions and their values, here's IBM's:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?...