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CuriosityStream Inc. up 38.44%

KULICKE & SOFFA INDUSTRIES INC up 11.98%

GREENBRIER COMPANIES INC up 5.53

Apollo Endosurgery Inc. up 5.51%

BIOGEN Inc up 4.13%

UGI CORP up 3.79%

Adtalem Global Education Inc. up 5.51%

CALIX INC up2.94%

Dun & Bradstreet Holdings Inc. up 0.9%

CROWN CASTLE INTERNATIONAL CORP  up 0.88%

UNITEDHEALTH GROUP INC down -1.33%

Anthem Inc.  down -1.81%

All it takes is a $million dollars sometime and a track record behind it.  Founder John Hendricks purchased 74,000 shares of Curiosity Stream at $13.50 on 2-8. By the end of the week, it was up 38.44%.  CURI is an American factual media and entertainment company that offers video programming including documentaries, TV shows, and short-form video content to subscribers. It was launched in 2015 by the founder of the Discovery Channel, John S. Hendricks. Wikipedia  

This is not the first time he purchased shares either.  We blogged about it when it was $8.99 per share, about half of what it is trading at now. Seriously can you afford not to subscribe to The Insiders Report.

Director Mitzcik bought 2310 shares of Kulic & Sofa Industries at $43.31  All things semiconductors were hot as a firecracker last week as the chatter was all about the global semiconductor industry impacting the auto industry. Semiconductors have been leading this market for years now. Even Intel was lit up as two insiders bough stuck the week before.  We’d be all over this buy of KLIC but it’s up 11.98% over what his puny $100k buy was at.  For now, I’d stick with moribund Intel and buy all semiconductor equipment supply companies on any pullbacks. Semiconductors are a strategic imperative.  Read our blog post on Intel last week for the goods on this trade.

CEO Furman bought 50,000 shares of Greenbrier Companies last week at $43.37 per share. The Greenbrier Companies is an American publicly traded transportation manufacturing corporation based in Lake Oswego, Oregon, United States. Greenbrier specializes in transportation services, notably barge and railroad car manufacturing, railroad car refurbishment, and railroad car leasing/management services. Wikipedia

The collapse in oil prices has smacked Greebrier hard.  All those trainloads of all coming down from the Baaken are on Greenbrier leased rail cars and tankers. AFTER SELLING his stock at or near this price since 2017, this is a stunning reversal. Much can and should be made of this. Wells Fargo analyst Allison Poliniak-Cusic upgraded Greenbrier to Overweight from Underweight with a price target of $40, up from $30. So it’s already past your price target and the CEO is hand over fist buying it. The analyst goes on to say 2021 will likely prove to be the bottom in earnings this cycle. That’s so typical of Wall Street analysts, They are smart, know their industry but for the most part are terrible stock pickers. They tell you to buy at the top and sell at the bottom.

 

+10% Owner Neil Gagnon purchased 53,543 shares of APEN at $4.85 per share.  Apollo Endosurgery, Inc. is a medical device company focused on less invasive therapies for the treatment of obesity, a condition facing over 600 million people globally, as well as other gastrointestinal conditions.  Talk about growth industries; fat people in America? Come on.  Gagnon is a hedge fund owner so I can’t read too much into this buy other than thanks for helping me discover what APEN does.  It’s a microcap company with declining revenues for the last five years.  So what gives?  This one is going to take some research so don’t be surprised if you hear more from us on it.  They just announced they were transitioning to a new CEO. 

According to the new CEO, Mr. McKhan, “This is an exciting time for Apollo,” Mr. McKhann stated. “As an innovative company with truly game-changing technology, we have the potential to revolutionize gastrointestinal procedures and the management of obesity, improving the lives of millions of patients with GI and bariatric conditions. We have extraordinary opportunities to continue to accelerate the expansion of our product franchises globally. I am honored to lead Apollo and the management team as we execute our strategy of delivering life-changing technology to our patients and generating profitable growth for our Company.”

 X-Tack is a new, through-the-scope, suture-based device designed specifically for closing and healing defects in the lower gastrointestinal tract with additional applications in the upper gastrointestinal tract.

Director Mantas bought 898 shares of Biogen at $267.00 per share.

Three reasons why I think Biogen’s Alzheimer drug aducanumab will get approval from the FDA. PDUFA date under priority extended by three months to June 7, 2021. Advisory Committee meeting November 6, 2020 voted that treatment was not effective.

  1. 4-30-19 Sarissa Capital Alex Denner buys $27 million at $229.94
  2. 11-30-20 CEO Vounatsos buys 3100 at $241.31
  3. 2-9-21 Director Mantas 898 at $267

The real takeaway is that Alex Denner has not sold the stock and he is as knowledgeable and savvy a biotech investor as we know of.

Sarissa Capital is a hedge fund that specializes in biotech. Alex Denner is the head of it. He used to head up Icahn’s biotech team.
According to this BIIB is 19.27% of the portfolio. It’s their largest holding  They know what they are doing. I don’t know though how current the info is as they are under 5% so they don’t have 13d filing requirements but Alexander Demmer, the owner is on the board of BIIB so he would have to file I think form 4 within 48 hours (even if he disclaimed beneficial ownership).
It’s a smallish hedge fund, but they are all scientists and Drs. They know what they are doing. The principal is on the board of Biotech. If you’re on the board of a company and you hold stock in it thru a hedge fund and you don’t claim beneficial ownership do you have to file a form 4 when you sell or can you get by with a 13F. This is a big question and the answer is probably yes – you have to file a form 4 according to our securities attorney, Brian Innes.
Ironically, no one seems to think Biogen’s aducanumab is very effective, including this author.  On the other hand small-cap, SAVA Sciences is showing good results with their drug. It’s early, though for SAVA and there is a long row ahead. They say if Biogen gets approval it’s good for $100 on their stock price.  On the other hand, if SAVA gets approval, it’s good for $1500 
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Dun and Bradstreet Holdings insiders have been stepping up their buying of the business rating company since it went public again. The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation is a company that provides commercial data, analytics, and insights for businesses. After a brief period in private hands, a familiar name in corporate financial analytics is returning to the stock exchange. Dun & Bradstreet has launched an initial public offering (IPO) and is about to be listed anew on the market. All told, the company floated just over 78.3 million shares of its common stock, priced at $22 each, to raise roughly $1.7 billion.
We wrote in our blog last week that insiders were stepping up their buying.  CEO Jabbour bought 42,900 DNB shares at $23.26 and CFO Hipsher bought 5000 at $23.30. Anthony Jabbour is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Dun & Bradstreet, a leading global provider of business decisioning data and analytics.  Anthony concurrently serves as CEO of Black Knight, Inc., a premier provider of integrated software, data, and analytics to the mortgage industry. Not many people can be the CEO of one public company, much less two. Jack Dorsey and Steve Jobs pulled it off. I don’t know if Jabbour can. I guess we’ll see next week when Black Knight reports earnings. We just blogged about it too.
This is on top of shares bought earlier in the year at higher prices. The stock has been a laggard but when there’s smoke, there usually is fire. It’s just difficult for companies to re-emerge from the ashes of a private equity takeout.  Too much debt, too much greed. Data and analytics company Dun & Bradstreet was acquired by a group of investors led by CC Capital, Cannae Holdings, and funds affiliated with Thomas H. Lee Partners, for $6.9 billion. Today’s market cap is close to $9.9 billion. This is a trade and for now, not much more.  Oddly enough I hired the past CEO of Dun and Bradstreet to be the Chairman of the Board of the Internet company I founded and brought public in 1997.
UnitedHealth Group Director Flynn bought 1500 shares of UNH at $332.68 and Dir Schneider bought 1700 ANH Anthem Inc at $162.03.  Both giant health care insurers are predictable laggards in the Democratic majority.  It’s no secret that Medicare for All could be a terminal illness for the private insurance industry.  Generally, when insiders start to buy in a cluster like this it’s time to take notice.  Both insurers have underperformed the market after years of outperformance. Expect more of the same. A few more insider buys may change my tune but for now, we are traders not investors and swing traders at that.
Crown Castle International adds another director to the insider buying parade.  Director Thornton bought 1500 shares of this cell phone tower REIT.  Why not? It looks like a no-brainer for yield with its hefty 3.26% dividend that’s growing as 5G is a hit for CCI.  We own a lot of CCI.

On January 27th they issued a press release”…announced today that it has signed a new long-term agreement with Verizon to support Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband and 5G Nationwide deployment. Specifically, Verizon has committed to lease 15,000 new small cells from Crown Castle over the next four years. Once installed, the small cell leases will have an initial term of 10 years.

“Verizon has led the industry in 5G deployment and has been at the forefront of building a strong ecosystem of stakeholders who will continue to drive forward this essential platform for innovation,” said Gina Cacciatore, Executive Director of Network Engineering and Operations for Verizon. “This agreement with Crown is an important component of our 5G expansion plans and will advance the infrastructure requirements for many more people to access this revolutionary technology.”

 

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Insiders sell stock for many reasons, but they generally buy for just one – to make money. You’ve always heard the best information is inside information.  Everyone who has any experience at all in the stock market pays close attention to what insiders are doing.  After all, who knows a business better than the people running it?  Officers, directors, and 10% owners are required to inform the public through a Form 4 Filing any transaction, buy, sell, exercise, or any other with 48 hours of doing so. This info is available for free from the SEC’s Web site, Edgar, although we subscribe to SECForm4  as they provide a way to manage and make sense of the vast realms of data. I’ve tried a lot of vendors and SECForm4 is one of the most customer-friendly and responsive I’ve used.

We publish a subscription newsletter called The Insiders Report.  We offer a free 30-day trial so you have nothing to lose by trying it out. Be sure to carefully read the TERMS OF SERVICE. The only thing we guarantee is that if you buy an annual Double Black Diamond subscription and you don’t pay for it on your first trade, it’s free, on us.

Another source for insider buying and selling and much more is FinViz Elite. FinViz stands for financial visualization and they do an amazing job of providing reams of data and the tools to help you get to the bottom of it, the information that helps me make informed decisions and probable outcomes. I’ve been using their site for years and it only gets better over time.

This is as close to “insider information” that an ordinary investor is likely to see- and it’s entirely legal. 

BEWARE– Following insiders can be hazardous to your financial health unless you know what you are doing.  Unlike the raw, unfiltered data, The Insiders Fund blog informs you of the purchases that count, the ones that are just window dressing into deceiving the public that all is hunky-dory, and those that are just flat out other people’s money and should be just discarded like bad fish. As a rule, we only look at material amounts of money, $200 thousand or more, as anything less could just be window dressing.

The bar is different from 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 and options. 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 is large planned sale programs that start without warning. Unfortunately, the public information disclosure requirements about these programs referred to as Rule 10b5-1 is horrendously poor. Also planned sales that just pop up out of nowhere are basically sales and are seeking cover under the Sarbanes Oxley corporate welfare clause. I also generally ignore 10 percent shareholders as they tend to be OPM (other people’s money) and perhaps not the smart money we are trying to read the tea leaves on.

Of course, insiders can also be wrong about their Company’s prospects. Don’t let anyone fool you into believing they never make mistakes.  No one tracks and understands insider behavior better than us. We’ve been doing it religiously since 2001 when I quit being an insider myself and devoted myself full time to managing my personal investments. They can easily be wrong about how much others will value them, and in many cases, maybe most cases have no more idea what the future may hold than you or I. In short, you can lose money following them.  We have and we curse aloud, what were they thinking!  Needless to say, past good fortune is no guarantee of future success.  We may own positions, long or short, in any of these names and are under no obligation to disclose that. We welcome your comments on our analysis.

This blog is solely for educational purposes and the author’s own amusement.  Investing with The Insiders Fund is for qualified investors and by Prospectus only. Nothing herein should be construed otherwise.  THE INSIDERS FUND invests in companies at or near prices that management has been willing to invest significant amounts of their own money in.  If you would like to hear more about how you can get involved with the Insiders Fund, please schedule some time on my calendar. 

Prosperous Trading,

Harvey Sax

The Insiders Fund was the 4th best long-short equity fund in the world in 2019