Nikola shares fall continues as insider lockdown ends

In June, the future hydrogen truck manufacturer Nikola became a listed company through a merger with a specialist acquisition company. The deal included a 180-day lock-in for company insiders, designed to prevent them from selling their shares to unsuspecting investors in the first few days of trading.

Today is the first day these insiders can sell their shares, and Nikola’s share price is down 15%. This comes on top of the 26% drop yesterday after Nikola announced the cancellation of his Badger van.

Nikola’s stock is now down around 80% from its post-IPO peak in June and 65% since the deal with GM was announced in September. The failure to strike this deal, announced yesterday, forced Nikola to abandon the Badger.

According to CNBC, the majority of shares released on Tuesday belong to founder and former executive chairman Trevor Milton, who owned more than 90 million Nikola shares. Milton was forced to resign from Nikola in September after learning he lied about the functionality of the company’s first product, the Nikola One. In fact, the truck never worked; a promotional video featuring the truck “in motion” actually showed it rolling down a hill.

A spokesperson for Milton declined to tell CNBC if he had sold any of his shares. But what is clear is that trading on Nikola was unusually high on Tuesday morning. As of this writing this Tuesday around 3 p.m. EST, over 60 million shares have changed hands. This compares to an average of around 20 million shares traded on a typical day in November – although that’s less than the 93 million shares that changed hands on Monday.