Top insider trades (Fri, Jan 9)

Connor’s Commentary

There were 160 insider trades filed, yet 0 interesting insider purchases.

• CEO, CFO, and Chief Legal Officer at Broadcom (AVGO) all combined to sell $45M of the stock in unscheduled sales. Reminder: insider selling at tech companies is rarely a good signal (though interesting that they aren’t using 10b5-1 plans)

• Director at Maze Therapeutics (MAZE) sold $1.15M after the stock's 200% run-up in the last 6m. It's their first-ever sale of MAZE

• $2M of insider sales at Perpetua Resources (PPTA) by 4 insiders. However, 3 of them were tax sales, and the other was converting and selling options that expire on Jan 20th. Nothing to worry about

• 3 directors at Photronics (PLAB) just sold $1M of the stock. The stock is up 60% in the last 3m

• General Counsel and Chief Accounting Officer at AAR Corp (AIR) sold $455k in an unscheduled sale. However, her track record on selling is no good.

• and more…

Commentary

Happy Friday!

Let’s take a look at what’s been going on this week in insider trading land.

A very good week for the CEO Watcher Tracking portfolio, which was up 5.8% v 0.92% for the S&P.

That brings us to nearly 15% returns since we started the tracking portfolio on November 1 v just 0.45% for the S&P.

While I do believe our historical data shows us that the CEO Watcher Portfolio should perform well, 14.5% of outperformance in two months is insane and not something I expect to continue.

As a reminder, the CEO Watcher Portfolio is a small portfolio I started with ~$10,000 to buy equally weighted positions in some of the insider trades we add to the High Signal Watchlist, so we have a real-money portfolio to track the performance of CEO Watcher. We typically hold ~25 stocks in there (no options).

We added three new stocks to the High Signal Watchlist this week, and two of them to the CEO Watcher Portfolio.

Of course, the one I didn’t add to the Portfolio is already up 30% while the two I did add are basically flat.

We started the High Signal Watchlist on September 25th, and 83 stocks have been added to it so far. Those 83 stocks have an average return of 7.9% so far v 2.6% for the S&P. So far, the High Signal Watchlist does indeed seem to be high signal.

CEO Watcher Premium subscribers can see the High Signal Watchlist, plus the stocks owned in the CEO Watcher Portfolio (plus a bunch of other data), in the CEO Watcher Dashboard. The link is always included at the top of the Data Dump section in this email.

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We had ~200 new trades filed each day this week, which is a pretty good number. However, 90% of them were scheduled/low signal, well above the average of ~70%.

There have been a ton of 10b5-1 sales and tax sales to start the year, and as we enter earnings season, executives will be in blackout periods, so we will see the total number of trades come down to under 100 per day.

Our favorite insider sentiment chart has stopped its climb toward the “Very Bullish” threshold, but is still well into the “Bullish” range.

This week, the percentage of unscheduled insider trades that were buys was a little below the median. That is now 5 of the last 6 weeks where this is the case (which helps explain why the Insider Sentiment chart above stopped increasing).

However, I don’t think this is anything to worry about. As of now, it looks like the S&P is more than happy to continue its march “up and to the right”.

Have a great weekend!

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

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