On worrying about insider sales

I notice that AYX just started making money last Q as you noted, but their CEO has sold 200k shares since then. Does this concern you at all?

Hi Najdorf,
No actually, I consider that irrelevant. As I mentioned recently, if you look back at amazon, for instance, anytime in the last 15 years, you see nothing but sales. I just looked and saw maybe 100 insider sales over the past two years, with no buys, that’s ALL insider sells, and NO insider buys. Then if I look at their stock price for the past two years, the price has almost tripled from 500+ to 1400+.
What more can I say?
Saul

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Hi Saul,

Hi Najdorf,
No actually, I consider that irrelevant

Okay. I would posit that it is irrelevant in some/many but not all cases.

As I mentioned recently, if you look back at amazon, for instance, anytime in the last 15 years, you see nothing but sales.

Just looking at CEO Bezos, in the past Q he’s sold 160k shares. But he owns 79 MILLION shares, plus options.

Going back two years he had 83m shares, so a net drop of about 5% or so.

His shareholdings in Amazon are 111 Billion dollars. Interests are aligned with shareholders!

What more can I say?

I think it is a very different scenario when the CEO has sold 760k shares and only owns ~226k shares [plus options vesting over 4 years]. That’s $6.3m of beneficial exposure in a ~$2Bn firm.

Your mileage may vary, and I’m not predicting any imminent disaster for AYX.

best,

Naj

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Alterix is an unusual case - less than 1% held by insiders, and less than 30% held by institutions. But a lot of the young, growing companies we’re buying have very low insider ownership.

But a lot of the young, growing companies we’re buying have very low insider ownership.

Can you give me some other examples if you don’t mind?

tks,