Plus, the diesel dilemma When investors hear the words “insider trading,” they think of profitable stock tips exchanged on a golf course or through some coded message: “Blue Horseshoe loves Anacott Steel.”But executives legally buy or sell tens of billions of dollars worth of their own companies’ shares each year. Parsing that publicly available information can help us non-insiders too if we can guess why they did it. Sometimes it’s an urge to take profits after an exceedingly strong run or snag a bargain when markets are too pessimistic.
Big Wall Street banks will unveil third-quarter results next week. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase have all more-or-less quadrupled their earnings per share in a decade and the broader KBW Nasdaq Bank Index hit a record high this summer. Are investors too optimistic? The number of financial executives buying their own stock fell to the lowest in almost 23 years during the third quarter, according to Ben Silverman, head of research at Verity Data.
The number of sellers wasn’t elevated. That still left the “Unique Seller/Buyer Ratio” his company tracks the highest of any sector relative to its long-term average during the period.
Source: Wall Street Journal Markets · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing