Top insider trades (Mon, Feb 2)

Connor’s Commentary

There were 73 new insider trades filed.

One insider trade was flagged as High Signal and added to the portfolio. 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.

• CEO at International Paper (IP) bought $2M of the stock (first-ever purchase).

• The CEO and CFO at Northrim BanCorp (NRIM) have now bought the post-earnings dip. First-ever purchase for the CEO

• A director at IBM bought $300k of the stock (largest purchase ever)

• The first ever insider at USA Rare Earth (USAR) bought the stock. A director bought $30k.

• The General Counsel, CFO, and Exec Chair combined to sell $9.25M of AGNC Investment Corp (AGNC) after its 20% run-up in the last 3 months

• Carlyle Group sold $1.5B of StandardAero (SARO). It's their largest sale ever

• The co-President at Morgan Stanley (MS) sold $6M of the stock. It's his largest sale ever, but it looks like he sells at the start of each year

• Another director at Applied Digital (APLD) sold $1.77M of the stock after its 350% run-up in the last year

• AE Red Holdings continues to sell Redwire (RDW) on this run. They've sold over $360M in January

• and more…

Commentary

A subscriber asked me to look into regional banks, as they said it felt like we’ve flagged quite a few regional banks as High Signal Trades.

The first notable point about regional banks is that the regional bank index has barely recovered from the 2023 Silicon Valley Bank crisis and hasn’t yet returned to 2022 levels.

I also know that Derek Pilecki, the very good fund manager of the financials-focused hedge fund Gator Capital, is quite long regional banks right now (I’m still eagerly awaiting his Q4 fund letter).

You can see a bunch of regional banks in his last quarterly holdings here.

Looking at our industry rankings, we see that Financials are in second place.

However, when we look at regional banks specifically, we see that they always have a very high percentage of insider trades that are buys.

There was a well-timed peak in insider buying in Q1 2023 after the Silicon Valley Bank crisis crushed many bank stocks, and another well-timed slowdown in H2 2024 before the Regional Bank ETF fell 25% from November to April.

Overall though, there does not appear to be a recent uptick in insider buying at regional banks. In fact, it’s been on a downward trajectory since 2020.

However, many banks have seen significant insider buying recently, and their performance has been strong.

The screenshot below shows the Top 12 banks ranked by insider buying in the last 6 months. They’ve outperformed the S&P by 2% on average since their most recent purchase.

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

CEO Watcher Premium

The rest of this email (including today’s top insider trades + all the charts and data) is for CEO Watcher Premium subscribers only. To see an example of the Premium email, click here.

Upgrade to CEO Watcher Premium at ceowatcher.com to unlock:

• The Premium daily emails

• Full access to the website, which has all insider trades back to 2009. It includes search/filters and the returns of every trade and every insider to help you find the top insider trades

• Full access to the CEO Watcher Premium Discord where I share my notes and holdings in the CEO Watcher Portfolio

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

If CEO Watcher Premium is not for you, I give full refunds with no questions asked.