Top insider trades (Fri, Jan 16)

Connor’s Commentary

Today, we’ll look at the weekly overview of insider sentiment and the CEO Watcher Premium Portfolio.

There were 102 new insider trades filed.

One insider trade was flagged as High Signal. CEO Watcher Premium subs can see those in the Trade Notes section of this email or the CEO Watcher Premium Dashboard that is linked in the Data Dump section.

As a reminder, if you upgrade to CEO Watcher Premium (link) and find that it isn’t for you, I’ll give you a refund.

• As most of you already know, a director at Micron (MU), who I believe is also the former chairman of TSMC, bought $7.8M of the stock. First-ever purchase and first open market purchase by any insider at Micron since 2017 (over 200 consecutive sales).

• Eric Sprott, 10% at Hycroft Mining (HYMC), continues buying large amounts of the stock. He bought another $6.6M

• Charles Clough makes his 5th largest purchase (out of 39) of Clough Global Opportunities Fund (GLO). Not for me, but pays a 10% dividend

• Chief People Officer at Immuneering (IMRX) makes a small $11k dip buy

• Exec Chairman and a Director at Jabil (JBL) combined to sell $5.75M

• A couple of executives at Olema Pharmaceuticals (OLMA) sold $6M of the stock after its 500% rise in the last 6 months.

• AAR Corp (AIR) insiders continue to sell into this run-up. Another $2.65M by the CEO

• Another EVP at Costco (COST) sells $1.4M

• Urban Outfitter (URBN) co-presidents are still selling

• and more…

Commentary

The week is coming to an end, so let’s review!

The CEO Watcher Portfolio is up a little over 4% this week v -0.3% for the S&P.

We are closing in on 20% of outperformance v the S&P since we opened the CEO Watcher Portfolio in November, which is pretty wild.

At some point, we’ll hit a cold streak, but apparently not this week.

The gains this week were driven by a few big biotech insider trade wins, including Zenas Biopharma (ZBIO), which is up 16% since I shared it with CEO Watcher Premium subs in the email on Monday, and an undisclosed biotech position that is up 12% (it was shared with CEO Watcher Premium subs last Thursday, but I’m not disclosing to free subs yet).

We also own a power solutions and communication systems company that services defense contractors, which popped 18% yesterday. We found some insiders buying the dip in this stock about a month ago.

As always, CEO Watcher Premium members can always see all of the current holdings in the Data Dump section of this email and the CEO Watcher Premium Dashboard (which is linked at the top of the Data Dump section).

As a reminder, the CEO Watcher Portfolio is a standalone portfolio I started with ~$10k to buy equally-weighted positions in High Signal Stocks. I also hold much larger positions in many of the High Signal Stocks in my main personal portfolio.

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Taking a look at insider sentiment, our favorite chart still shows that insiders are clearly in the “Bullish” range.

And it doesn’t look like that will change any time soon.

Taking a look at the daily % of Trades that are Buys chart, we see a pretty choppy chart with most days below the median.

We’ve had a very slow start to 2020 in terms of the number of unscheduled trades filed each day because we are entering earnings season, and most insiders cannot make unscheduled trades.

So this daily bar chart is going to remain volatile for the next five or six weeks. That’s why we prefer the rolling sentiment chart I shared before. It smooths this all out.

Finally, looking at the S&P chart, it is just chugging along above all the moving averages.

Same old story we’ve had for a while now. I don’t really see anything to worry about (outside of Trump doing something crazy, which is always a possibility).

keep scrolling. top trades + all of the charts and data below

CEO Watcher Premium

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• The Premium Dashboard, which has a bunch of charts/tables with insider trading data that is updated each day

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