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发表于 2010-10-25 01:01 PM
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The corporate insiders running our country’s publicly traded companies have been heavily selling their stock, which some market pros say speaks volumes about the veracity of the current rally.
The market has moved sharply higher since August 27, when Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke suggested that he and his allies on the FOMC might consider another bond purchase program in order to juice economic activity. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY), which includes holdings like Exxon (XOM), Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM), and Bank of America (BAC), is up 11% since Bernanke’s speech.
But, even as hedge funds and prop traders at the big commercial banks might be buying, one group of investors has carefully side-stepped this rally: corporate insiders.
The MBA-stamped professionals with the most knowledge and insight about their company’s prospects -- the chief executives and chief financial officers -- have been busy selling their shares.
Alan Newman, editor of the Crosscurrents newsletter, recently surveyed insider activity in three sectors. Newman says the selling he’s seeing among the C-suite crowd right now is some of the most dramatic in years.
For instance, Newman tallied how insiders feel about the top Nasdaq companies. He looked at only nine of the top 10 because one of the ten is Teva Pharmaceutical (TEVA), which isn’t an American company and didn’t have any insider transactions listed in his database. But, of the nine remaining, the selling is some of the most aggressive Newman says he’s seen since he began doing this exercise 10 years ago in the midst of the tech mania.
Specifically, the stats show 238 sellers and only 2 buyers over the last six months, a ratio of 119 sellers for every buyer. Share purchases totaled 9,500 against a total sold of 88.9 million. That’s a ratio of 9,354 shares sold for every share purchased.
Newman looked at two other sectors as well. He checked out insider activity for the retailers, mining the Retail HOLDRs Trust (RTH) for data. There, he found 139 sales versus only 5 buys, a sell/buy ratio of 28:1. Close to 23 million shares were dumped versus 27 thousand bought, a sell/buy ratio of 944:1.
Finally, Newman posed the same analysis for the Semiconductor HOLDRs Trust (SMH), which also showed the same pattern of serious selling in the front offices: 122 sales and only one buy. That lone buy was for just 1,000 shares while insiders sold 5.7 million shares.
The table below represents the grand share totals for the three sectors. “Clearly, insiders are seeing great value only in cash,” Newman writes.
Still, other market pros don’t necessarily assign patterns of insider selling the same degree of importance.
Peter Boockvar, an equity strategist at Miller Tabak, says such insider selling does remain noteworthy and worth investigating. However, he says, the decision of executives to cash out their own shares might have less to do with their outlooks for their companies and the broader market, and more to do with any number of personal financial reasons, such as expectations that tax rates might move higher come January 2011.
“This is certainly worth noting, but there are a variety of reasons that insiders could be selling stock,” Boockvar says. “For all I know, they could be selling because they want to capture 2010 tax rates.”
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狗仔卡
发表于 2010-10-25 12:42 PM
