Monday, January 30, 2017

About the Trump stock market surge. Corporate insiders ...


 -by New Deal democrat

Donald Trump might want to stop touting how well the stock market has been doing since his election.

Here is Barron's graph of insider trading as of Saturday:

Ouch!

But wait a minute .... This is January, and in January corporate insiders get dump trucks full of stock options that they might decide to cash in, so no big deal.

Or so I thought.

Since I'm not the only one who from time to time publishes this graph, I thought I would find the record of corporate transactions that included last January.  Surely it would show the same pattern.  Well, here's one from last May:


Ooops.

Not only did corporate insiders *not* sell in January 2016, and not only do the last two peaks, at about 40:1, come nowhere near the 60:1 ratio from this past week, but at least one of those last two spikes in insider selling, in October 2015, was followed shortly thereafter by a stock market downturn of over 10%:



On second  thought -- go ahead and crow, Donald!