INSIDER BUYING HITS 2010 HIGHS
8 March 2010 by Cullen Roche
4 Comments
Insider buying jumped to new 2010 highs in the week ending March 5th. Insider buying totaled $191.76MM while selling totaled $1.45B. Buying was substantially higher than last week’s reading of just $13.22MM. Selling was well off its high of $1.9B, but remains very high historically. Of course, its the buying that is most interesting because insiders sell for various reasons. They only buy, however, when they believe their stock price is going higher.
Notable buying:
Notable selling:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/192385-net-insider-transactions-cycle-back-to-selling
The idea that last week’s data reflects some sort of a major uptick in insider buying is totally misleading. Well over 50% of the buying activity was in one semiconductor “XXIA,” which interestingly saw a director purchase $106M while a 10% (or more) owner in the company, “Technology Capital Group,” sold $195M worth of XXIA stock; their entire holdings. Then the same director who bought also sold $9M worth of stock. Note that all this activity took place on the exact same day, March 2. It amounts to a whole lot of juggling with absolutely no possible bullish spin. Eliminating activity in XXIA, selling activity was roughly 16 times more than buying activity – just last week.
Insider selling remains at alarming highs (week after week) and buying at historic lows.
It would be interesting to see buying/selling plotted against stock prices and the market as a whole. My gut tells me many insiders are often no better at prediction future price moves than anyone else. In other words, I wonder what predictive value insider buying/selling has and if it might even be a contrarian signal. Surely some academic has run these numbers?
was this written by the AP?
buying = .1 * selling, but the headline is about record levels of buying???
give me a fucking break. stop with the smoking mirrors.