Planting trees at Yahoo…

They say planting trees shows faith in the future. In corporate suites, the equivalent guesture would be buying stock in your own company.

And behold, Sue Decker, Yahoo’s president is buying stock. And lots of it. In a Form 4 filed Thursday, Decker paid about $1.1 million to buy 47,000 shares on the open market. It’s her first open market purchase since 2001, when as CFO, she bought 10,000 shares for a total of $58,241.

Over her career as an insider at Yahoo, she’s sold about 2.6 million shares to collect $80.7 million, for a net gain of $63.4 million.

But being a bit of a wet blanket, former chief executive and now director Terry Semel made about $1.5 million selling 100,000 shares on the same day.

Yahoo’s stock closed Friday at $23.94 per share, well below its peak this year of $33.61.

Should Google be nervous?

Well

Yet another innovative way to make huge piles of cash at Google…

Remember that ”Transferable Stock Option” program that Google announced last December? Well, apparently it kicked off in April. And in a 10-Q filed on Thursday, the company announced some details about how it worked.

For the three months ending June 30, employees auctioned off 353,593 shares and raised a total of at a total value of $90.7 million, or $256.58 per share. So what does that mean?

Let’s say the strike price for your Google option is $200 and the stock is trading at $500. So really, it’s worth $300 to you, right? Under the TSO program, that employee can use an online tool to auction that option to financial institutions who might be willing to pay that employee more than that $300 spread, essentially betting that the stock will rise even further over time. You get more money now, the bank gets more money later. Maybe.

So in this case, the filing tell us that bidders were on average willing to pay $256.58 for each option, their view of what the spread is worth. It’s also telling us that based on that amount, each option auctioned off by a Google employee brought them $30.25 more per share than they would have gotten if they had just exercised their option and sold it on the market.

Got it? Okay, class dismissed.

Google: Search engine or ATM?…

The Google money machine rolls on. And on. And on.

This week, topping the insider sales list are a couple of familiar faces.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt sold 73,934 shares for prices ranging from $505.60 a share to $520.09 a share between July 27 and July 31 to collect $37.9 million.

Director John Doerr sold 58,650 shares for prices ranging from $509.50 to $515.10 a share on Aug. 1 to collect $30 million.

Senior vice president of worldwide sales Omid Kordestani sold 6,000 shares for prices ranging from $509.19 to $514.83 a share to collect $3.1 million.