As the market has sold off, insiders are starting to take advantage of lower prices. This last week was disappointing as there were few notable buys. They are listed below:
Buys
NMRK Newmark Group- CEO Barry Gosin purchased $9 million worth at an average price of $9.05 per share. Newmark Group, Inc. provides commercial real estate services in the United States and internationally. Its investor/owner services and products include capital markets, such as investment sales; and agency leasing, property management, valuation and advisory, and diligence and underwriting, as well as government sponsored enterprise lending, loan servicing, debt and structured finance, and loan sales under the Berkeley Point and NKF Capital Markets names. It has a yield of 3.9%.
HOME At Home Group 4 insiders purchased $1 million worth of this home decor superstore operator. The company’s stores offer approximately 50,000 items, such as accent furniture, mirrors, patio cushions, rugs and wall arts, artificial flowers and trees, bedding and bath products, candles, garden and outdoor décors, holiday accessories, home organization products, pillows, pottery, vases, and window treatments. As of November 19, 2018, it operated approximately 175 stores in 36 states. We see no reason to buy this stock
ARMK Aramark Chairman Foss’s $3 million purchase at $32.46 was his first purchase since November of 2016. Not sure what Foss sees here since the stock is basically flat since then.
Sales
Nothing too out of the ordinary showed up last week in sales. It’s become increasingly difficult to read the tea leaves regarding the $ millions of dollars of sales every week due to the proliferation of the Sarbanes Oxley era loophole of 10b5-1 trading plans. The notable exceptions are as follows:
ZUO Zuora, Inc. provides cloud-based software on a subscription basis that enables companies in various industries to launch, manage, and transform into a subscription business. Cloud is the rage but that hasn’t deterred three insiders from selling $15.7 million worth of stock at an average price of $18.05 to $18.75.
WK Workiva Three insiders sold $2.3 million at $34.62 to $36.54 of this fast growing cloud solutions software provider for the finance and accounting, audit and internal controls, risk and compliance, and performance and management reporting markets in the United States and internationally. The company provides Wdesk, a platform with proprietary word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications to collect, link, report, and analyze the business data, as well as to create, review, and publish data-linked documents and reports
DM Dominion Midstream Partners CFO Chapman sold 16,000 shares at $19.22, not exactly what an investor wants to see when the company has $1.48 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 7.62%. Dominion Energy Midstream Partners’s dividend payout ratio (DPR) is currently 109.63%.
In this report, we examined open market purchases from employees and directors ending the week of October 5 2018. Insiders sell stock for many reasons, but they generally buy for just one – to make money. As a standard, we only look at material amounts of money, $200 thousand or more, as anything less could just be window dressing. The bar is different with selling, because the natural state of management is to be sellers. This is because most companies provide significant amounts of management compensation packages as stock. Therefore, with selling, we analyze for unusual patterns, such as insiders selling 25 percent or more of their holdings or multiple insiders selling near 52 week lows.Another red flag are large planned sale programs that start without warning. We generally ignore 10 percent shareholders as they tend to be OPM (other people’s money) and not the SMART money we are trying to go to school on. Although this info is available for free from the SEC’s Web site , Edgar, we subscribe to the Washington Service as they provide a way to manage and make sense of the vast realms of data.
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