Thursday 7 May 2009


Insiders Selling At A Furious Pace


whisper.jpgLast week there was a report that corporate insiders were selling at a faster rate that at any time since October, 2007 -- right near the top of the market.

Well, the market's only raged higher since then and insider selling is only getting more intsense.

The Pragmatic Capitalist has aggregated recent insider transactions. As you can see from his data collected (unfortunately the tables won't fit here, do click over), insider sales dwarf insider buys both in frequency and in volume. Insiders are selling their stocks in multi-million dollar blocks, while the few buys are much smaller.

If nothing else, it means that a lot of executives probably saw the abyss (a violent drop from the ranks of the wealthy to poor) and want to de-risk to ensure that no matter what happens to their stock, they've taken some skin out of the game.

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Joe Weisenthal is Editor of Clusterstock.
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25 Comments

DavidR said:
I am surprised this isn't getting more attention. As the blog says, these numbers are alarming. The insiders are selling massively into this this strength while the buying is literally non-existent.
clickbot said:
Great lead picture!
Thanks Clickbot, 
I'm curious what company hired that young boy as a top officer. And I wonder if they know he's giving insider tips to his grandma.
I don't have it in front of me, but weren't these numbers skewed by a few large insiders and in two cases families selling their remaining shares in companies - as planned. I believe TPG sold off a large chunk of a retailer, getting them out of the company altogether -as planned and then a family or the family trust of another large retailer did the same thing. If you back these out, the numbers were pretty much normal if I remember correctly.
smartone said:
Wait the same executives what didn't see the stock meltdown coming last year are now selling as the stock market is going up-- 

I think this is a classic contrarian indicator - it would be interesting to see what the stock price of these companies are in 6 months ( I bet they are much higher)
Hillbilly Gal said:
Maybe they are afraid of losing their jobs. They''ll need some dough to keep up the yacht payments.
"the market's only raged higher since the" 

WOW .. the market is higher today than in Oct 2007??? then why do I feel so poor Joe?