Not much going on- seems like the calm before the storm. Buy gold, the yellow stuff not the digital Bitcoin.

Finviz Chart

Name: William R Shepard
Position: Director
Transaction Date: 2025-01-16 Shares Bought: 1,429 Average Price Paid: $227.96 Cost: $325,798
Company: CME Group INC. (CME)

CME Group allows clients to trade futures, options, cash, and over-the-counter products, optimize portfolios, and analyze data, empowering market participants worldwide to manage risk and capitalize on opportunities. CME Group offers primary price discovery and referential pricing information to customers in a range of formats, including real-time, historical, and derived data for listed and cash products. CME Group also provides industry-leading research and analytics products to customers seeking market education resources. In addition, it runs one of the world’s largest central counterparty clearing services. 

Mr. Shepard has been on the board since 1997. Mr. Shepard has been a member of the CME for almost 45 years. He previously held the post of Director at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Inc. He previously served as the Second Vice Chairman, from 2002 until 2007. Mr. Shepard is the founder and president of Shepard International, Inc., a futures commission merchant. Mr. Shepard leads the clearing house oversight committee. Sheppard sits on the CME Group’s executive committee, as well as the remuneration, finance, and nominating committees.

Opinion: Interest rate volatility will help this exchange conglomerate. Monopolies are rare and when you can invest in one at a reasonable price, even rarer.

 

Finviz Chart

Name: Alexander Merk
Position: COO
Transaction Date: 2025-01-08 Shares Bought: 28,860 Average Price Paid: $21.99 Cost: $634,720
Company: ASA Gold & Precious Metals Ltd (ASA)
ASA Gold and Precious Metals Limited is a publicly held investment manager. The firm invests in public equities markets around the globe. It primarily invests in equities of companies that explore, mine, or process gold, silver, platinum, diamonds, and other precious minerals. It also invests in exchange-traded funds. To build its portfolios, the business uses fundamental analysis and a bottom-up methodology. The company obtains external research to supplement its in-house research. The firm focuses on the metals and mining industries. This record reflects ASA Gold & Precious Metals Limited investing preferences and overall investment strategy. ASA Gold and Precious Metals Limited was founded in 1958 and is headquartered in Portland, Maine.

Axel Merk is the President and Chief Investment Officer of Merk Investments, which manages the Merk Funds. He earned a B.A. in Economics (magna cum laude) and an M.Sc. in Computer Science at Brown University.

Opinion: This seems like more than an insider showing he has faith in his company and therefore his job security. I’d say this is opportunistic but I can’t figure out why buy thinly traded ASA and not GLD. Over the past year, the correlation between ASA stock price and the underlying commodity, gold, is only 76.59%. Over a 10 year period the correlation is about the same.

 

Finviz Chart

Name: David H. Naemura
Position: CFO
Transaction Date: 2025-01-16 Shares Bought: 14,800 Average Price Paid: $11.11 Cost: $164,428
Company: Neogen Corp (NEOG)

Name: John Edward Adent
Position: CEO
Transaction Date: 2025-01-16 Shares Bought: 23,035 Average Price Paid: $11.03 Cost: $254,076
Company: Neogen Corp (NEOG)

Neogen Corporation creates, manufactures, and markets a wide range of products and services related to food and animal safety. The Food Safety segment primarily sells diagnostic test kits and complementary products to food producers and processors to detect dangerous and/or unintended substances in human food and animal feed, such as foodborne pathogens, spoilage organisms, natural toxins, food allergens, ruminant by-products, meat speciation, drug residues, pesticide residues, and general sanitation concerns, as well as food quality and nutritional components. The increasing food safety product line also includes genomics-based diagnostic technology and powerful software tools that assist testers in objectively analyzing and storing their data from different sites over extended periods. 

David joined Neogen in 2022, bringing his experience as an operationally focused CFO in public business environments. Before joining Neogen, David was the Chief Financial Officer of Vontier Corporation, where he was important in the business’s separation and subsequent IPO as an independent public company. He formerly held the positions of Chief Financial Officer at Gates Industrial Corporation and Group Chief Financial Officer at Danaher Corporation. 

John became CEO of Neogen® in 2017, bringing with him extensive experience in food and animal safety. He has worked worldwide, from his fruit farm in Southwest Michigan to Hungary, the Philippines, Spain, and China. Before joining Neogen, he was CEO of Animal Health International. After Patterson acquired the company, John continued to serve as CEO of Patterson Animal Health. He has also held management positions at Ralston Purina Company and its spinoff subsidiary, Agribrands. Under his leadership as CEO and President, Neogen has expanded globally.

Opinion:

Finviz Chart

Name: Peter J.Thornton
Position: Director
Transaction Date: 2025-01-13 Shares Bought: 10,000 Average Price Paid: $8.05 Cost: $80,450
Company: Avadel Pharmaceuticals Plc (AVDL)

Name: Eric J Ende
Position: Director
Transaction Date: 2025-01-13 Shares Bought: 30,000 Average Price Paid: $7.84 Cost: $235,218
Company: Avadel Pharmaceuticals Plc (AVDL)
Avadel Pharmaceuticals Plc is a biopharmaceutical firm. LUMRYZ is an extended-release sodium oxybate formulation that should be administered once at bedtime for the treatment of cataplexy or EDS in adults with narcolepsy. Its principal product candidate is LUMRYZ, a sodium oxybate formulation that is now in Phase 3 clinical development for the treatment of excessive daytime drowsiness or cataplexy in adults with narcolepsy. The company was previously known as Flamel Technologies SA until changing its name to Avadel Pharmaceuticals plc in January 2017. Avadel Pharmaceuticals plc was established in 2015 and is based in Dublin, Ireland.

Peter J. Thornton has been a member of the Avadel Board of Directors since June 2017. He is the president and chief financial officer of Envetec Sustainable Technology Limited. This Irish company creates technology to treat biohazardous laboratory waste properly at its source while reducing carbon emissions. Peter is also the Director of Ocular Limited, an Irish company that creates and markets novel rapid microbiological assays and equipment. Peter has previously worked as Chief Financial Officer for Technopath Clinical Diagnostics.  He holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from University College Cork, Ireland.  

Dr. Eric J. Ende has been a member of the Avadel Board of Directors since December 2018. Eric is currently the President of Ende BioMedical Consulting Group and a member of Matinas BioPharma’s Board of Directors. Eric sat on Genzyme’s Board of Directors as a member of the Audit and Risk Management Committees. Dr. Ende previously worked as a biotechnology analyst at Merrill Lynch, Bank of America Securities, and Lehman Brothers before joining the Genzyme Board of Directors. Eric holds undergraduate degrees from Emory University. He received his MD at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine and an MBA from New York University’s Stern School.

Opinion:

Finviz Chart

Name: Antonio Bernardino Guimaraes Parada
Position: Director
Transaction Date: 2025-01-10 Shares Bought: 183,823 Average Price Paid: $2.72 Cost: $499,999
Company: iBio Inc. (IBIO)
iBio, Inc. is a preclinical-stage biotechnology startup that uses artificial intelligence to build hard-to-drug precision antibodies. The innovative technological stack, which includes AI-guided epitope-steering and monoclonal antibody optimization, is intended to reduce downstream development risk. Following the acquisition of nearly all of the assets of RubrYc Therapeutics, Inc., iBio concentrated on using AI and machine learning to discover and design antibodies against difficult-to-treat targets. This acquisition began the transformation to an AI-enabled biotech company, completed with the sale of the Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization location in Texas. 

António Parada is on the Board of Directors at iBio and the founder and CEO of FairJourney Biologics, a premier antibody discovery firm serving over 250 clients worldwide. He launched FairJourney in May 2012, and in June 2024, Partners Group bought a majority stake. He started the BioCodex Group, a consultancy firm, in 2002 and was its CEO until 2008. He has written 15 peer-reviewed articles in pharmacology, as well as others in botany, management, and security. Mr. Parada graduated from the University of Porto and earned an MBA from the Portuguese Catholic University. He has received the Porto Medal of Merit and the Matosinhos Career Award.

Opinion:

Finviz Chart

Name: Anthony G. Quinn
Position: Director
Transaction Date: 2025-01-10 Shares Bought: 210,791 Average Price Paid: $0.96 Cost: $203,209
Company: Generation Bio Co. (GBIO)
Generation Bio Co. is researching non-viral genetic medicines that will provide long-term, repeatable treatments for possibly hundreds of millions of people suffering from rare and common diseases. The company is creating two distinct and complementary platforms, which they think will enable highly varied pharmaceutical applications. The first platform is a very effective, cell-targeted lipid nanoparticle delivery method for nucleic acids. It is intended to prevent off-target clearance by the liver and spleen, allowing CtLNPs to remain in the systemic circulation while enabling extremely selective and potent ligand-driven targeting of certain tissues and cell types.

Anthony G. Quinn is an independent director of Generation Bio Co. From 2018 to 2022, he was the President, CEO, and Director of Spyre Therapeutics, Inc. Anthony has nearly two decades of biopharmaceutical industry experience. He was a dermatology professor at both Barts and London School of Medicine. Anthony received his Bachelor of Medical Science and MBChB degrees from the University of Dundee, as well as his PhD from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Anthony completed a postdoctoral program at the University of California, San Francisco, and is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London.

Opinion:


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This blog is solely for educational purposes and the author’s own amusement. IT IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE.  Think of the blog as part of my personal investment journal that I am willing to share with the DIY investor.  There are also many parts that I am not willing to share if I think it could influence trading action or be detrimental to the Fund’s partners. We could be long, short, or have no position at all in any of the stocks mentioned and express no written or implied obligation to disclose any of that.

Insiders sell the 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 with any stock market experience 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 of any transaction, buy, sell, exercise, or any other within 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. SECForm4 is one of the smaller ones, but I like supporting Frank. He is not arrogant. He’s helpful and has great prices. He also trades on his own data, so I like people that eat what they kill.

The bar is different from selling because the natural state of management is to be a seller. This is because most companies provide significant amounts of management compensation packages as stock and options. Therefore, we analyze unusual patterns with selling, 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, are horrendously poor. Also, planned sales that pop up out of nowhere are basically sales and are seeking cover under this corporate welfare loophole. I also generally ignore 10 percent shareholders as they tend to be OPM (other people’s money) and perhaps not the smart money on which we are trying to read the tea leaves. I say generally because some 10% shareholders are great investors. Think Warren  Buffett and others

Of course, insiders can also be wrong about their Company’s prospects. Don’t let anyone fool you into believing they never make mistakes.  Do your own analysis. They can easily be wrong, and in many cases, maybe most cases, have no more idea what the future may hold than you or me. In short, you can lose money following them.  We have, and we curse aloud; what were they thinking!

We like Fly on the Wall for keeping up with what events might be happening, analysts’ comments, and whatever else could be moving the stock.  Dow Jones news service is an essential tool, but many services pick up their feed like they do Bloomberg. For quick financial analysis, it’s hard to beat Old School Value.

A big callout to my assistant Ambreen who sets up this conversation by listing the notable buys that I’ve identified as soon as practically possible.  She probes the 10k for a reasonable description of the business. I’ve found that to be the most accurate and succinct place to find out what a business actually does. When I have time, over the weekend, I’ll add some preliminary analysis to the Opinion at the end. Sometimes I won’t update this for a couple of weeks or more.  A good way to use this blog is as I do, it’s a reference point and filing cabinet for various stocks with notable insider buying. It’s one of many tools I use.  I regularly live on Chat GPT and Microsoft Copilot now. I find the footnotes research very helpful in eliminating errors from AI hallucinations.

The Insiders Fund is for qualified investors and by Prospectus only. Nothing herein should be construed otherwise.  THE INSIDERS FUND prefers to invest in companies at or near prices that management has been willing to invest significant amounts of their own money in, but we have no requirement to do so. We also invest in many companies in anticipation of future insider buying or with the expectation that there is none at all.

You can be an insider, too– by clicking here

Prosperous Trading,

Harvey Sax
Insomniac Hedge Fund Guy