With so many stocks trading at what appears to be bargain prices I am keeping a closer eye on insider trading.
Melcor CEO Darrin Rayburn bought 1800 shares at $12.55 on Wednesday to hold 43,643. This was reported on Friday. A few days ago I mentioned that Andrew Melton had bought some shares as well. I am concerned that Melcor may report a weak Q4 in comparison to last year when they sold a surprisingly high number of home building lots in Q4. Possibly, this insider buying although it is not a very large number of shares and only two insiders buying indicates some confidence on the part of management that Q4 results will not be too bad. And of course the share price at some 42% of book value would seem to be pricing in quite a bit of gloom.
I mentioned that a couple of insiders had bought this week at Canadian Western Bank. Another insider bout 400 shares on Thursday at $25.76. He also bought 12 shares in his wife’s TFSA. That is of course a very tiny amount. But it may indicate that he wanted to scrape up even loose change to grab shares at this price.
There had not been any really recent insider buying at Linamar but on Thursday one insider bought 431 shares at $45 and another insider bought 862 at $45. Given the odd number of shares and given that one bought exactly twice the quantity that the other did I would suspect that these were buys using some kind of compensation or bonus from the company rather than independent buys with their own money.