Market Commentary July 2019

Who’s afraid of the big, bad bear? Not insiders so it seems. For all the headline noise from trade, tweets, oil prices, geopolitical fears, Brexit, interest rates and the ageing bull, insiders continue to show no fear. When equity markets move higher, as they have been doing of late, we typically see purchases from corporate executives and directors start to slow. That is very different from seeing this group start to sell, which is a big warning that stocks may have come too far too fast. Yet in this current uptrend, insiders have continued to acquire shares in a manner that tells us they are perfectly comfortable with the enthusiasm that is being displayed by “normal” investors. This shows there seems to be few worries from those who arguably are in the best position to judge the future prospects for publicly traded companies.