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MUSTANG BIO Inc up 16.35%
TUPPERWARE BRANDS CORP up 11.58%
Asana Inc. up 3.80%
CROWN CASTLE INTERNATIONAL CORP up 2.52%
First, the market. It definitely feels heavy to me and admittedly I’m nervous going long into tax season. Lots of investors sold stock last year to lock in lower capital gains rates in fear of the Biden administration raising the tax rate on long-term capital gains or perhaps any gains. The first two weeks in April are tough. They usually are as people sell stock to pay for their taxes. None the less that doesn’t change our view that is a market you must be in. Just be mentally prepared to give back some of your earnings. We still have a couple of weeks and we intend to make the best of it before raising substantial cash and perhaps shorting the indices as well.
It was good to see our friend Dr. Litchman come back and buy his beaten-down stock Mustang Bio. Litchman purchased $516k worth of stock at an average price of $3.12 immediately sending the stock up 16%. He’s yet to make any money from his prior four purchases since 2018 but when biotechs strike they can strike big. Last year we saw our position in Cassava go up 12 fold in a month. Not saying that is going to happen with MBIO but…
Mustang Bio, Inc. (“Mustang”) (NASDAQ:MBIO), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on translating today’s medical breakthroughs in cell and gene therapies into potential cures for hematologic cancers, solid tumors and rare genetic diseases. They are making the rounds with three investor conferences this month alone. It’s tough being a small developmental biotech CEO as you are in near-constant fundraising mode.
Tupperware– left for the dead brand is making some kind of revival. You could have bought this stock for under $5 in June of last year. Now insiders are buying in droves paying over $24. That’s a 500% return in less than 9 months. And everyone is talking about Tesla and not Tupperware- go figure.
Here’s the first insider buying on fast-growing cloud team project management software company Asana, Inc. Director Lorrie Norrington added 6200 shares at $32.12 to the 66,955 she owns. Meanwhile, ASAN management is selling their in-the-money options probably as fast as their lawyers and bankers will allow them to. If you want to own cloud software plays, you have to hold your nose. That’s just the way it is. We’ll probably nibble at this name and probably lose money at it too. Tech is just not where its at right now.
Director Lanis has a lot of confidence in Crown Castle International. He added another 1180 shares at $160.99. We like this name – have been trading and owning it for some time and collecting a decent dividend. We are a buyer below $155 and a seller around where it is trading today.
Follow us on Twitter for real time insider buying alerts at https://twitter.com/theinsidersfund
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.
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. I basically use it as my own worksheet. If we make money off this endeavor, no one will be more surprised than me. My sincere hope is that self-directed investors can learn from my realms of experience. 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, 4th Best in November 2020, 4th Best in January 2021 (I kid you not, 2 is actually my lucky number. I’m hoping for that in February when were up 15%)
