Sheryl Sandberg parts with some Facebook stock

There were plenty of headlines today about Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg dropping almost 2.4 million of her shares of the company’s stock last week, with a total haul for the COO coming up to about $91 million.

However, there’s more here than meets the eye, as any knowledgeable investor will tell you.

Sandberg is not unloading stock because she doesn’t think it can last at the price of about $38 per share. Instead, she’s simply monetizing some of her stock based upon a pre-arranged trading plan. What a plan like that does is takes away the timing of an executive’s sales so that top execs like Sandberg can cash in some of their stock without anybody being able to say that they are participating in insider training.

This isn’t the first time that Sandberg has unloaded a bit of her Facebook stock, either. She dropped about $50 million worth of stock last year, too. Other Facebook figures have done the same from time to time, including when CEO Mark Zuckerberg dropped 30.2 million shares during the company’s initial public offering.

Of course, Zuckerberg has already filed a statement that he will not be selling any further shares for at least a year. For her part, Sandberg still has well over 90% of the stock she started with, so it’s not as if she is going crazy with getting rid of stock.

Facebook has been on a nice upswing lately after a disappointing run after its IPO last year. After reaching prices above $38 per share, they saw a slight drop at just over 1% to $38.50 last week. However, fans of the company are standing firm with their optimism, based mostly upon the fact that the social media giant has far exceeded their earnings estimates recently. Monetization of the company’s huge user base has long been the biggest concern for investors in terms of the stock’s viability.