Insider Selling Nears Record Levels And These Are 3 of the Latest Sales

Statistics reveal that insider selling activity has increased significantly over the past several months, which might spur concerns about the current valuations of U.S-listed companies. TrimTabs Investment Research, an independent institutional research firm, recently revealed that the volume of insider selling totaled $7.6 billion in November, marking the fourth-highest monthly volume on record. Some market participants believe that this high level of insider selling activity could push non-insiders to start cashing out their equity holdings as well. Nonetheless, one should not forget that insiders can sell stock for numerous reasons, not all of which are related to their companies’ current valuations or future developments, including diversification and personal cash needs. Having this in mind, the following article will reveal several noteworthy insider sales registered at three companies and will also discuss the performance of these companies over the past several months.

Prior to discussing the insider trading activity, let’s make you familiar with what Insider Monkey does besides providing high-quality articles. At Insider Monkey, we track hedge funds’ moves in order to identify actionable patterns and profit from them. Our research has shown that hedge funds’ large-cap stock picks historically underperformed the S&P 500 Total Return Index by an average of seven basis points per month between 1999 and 2012. On the other hand, the 15 most popular small-cap stocks among hedge funds outperformed the S&P 500 Index by an average of 95 basis points per month (read more details here). Since the official launch of our small-cap strategy in August 2012, it has performed just as predicted, returning 102% and beating the market by more than 53 percentage points. We believe the data is clear: investors will be better off by focusing on small-cap stocks utilizing hedge fund expertise (while avoiding their high fees at the same time) rather than large-cap stocks.

RenaissanceRe Holdings Ltd. (NYSE:RNR) has registered high insider trading activity on the sell side this week. Mark Alexander Wilcox, Chief Accounting Officer, Senior Vice President and Corporate Controller, reported selling 30,366 shares on Monday at a weighted average price of $113.21, cutting his total stake to 47,029 shares. The shares of the global provider of reinsurance and insurance coverage have gained 14% thus far in 2015 and 79% over the past five-year period. Nevertheless, RenaissanceRe Holdings Ltd. (NYSE:RNR) has a cheap trailing price-to-earnings ratio of only 9.71, which is significantly below the average of 22.71 for the companies included in the S&P 500. On March 2, RenaissanceRe completed its previously-announced acquisition of property and casualty reinsurance coverage provider Platinum for roughly $1.93 billion. This deal has enabled to the company to broaden its portfolio of product offerings, but is also anticipated to accelerate the growth of its U.S specialty and casualty reinsurance platform. In the meantime, RenaissanceRe’s total revenue for the first three quarters of 2015 added up to $1.14 billion, compared to $941.28 million reported for the same period of last year. The number of hedge funds from our database with stakes in the company dropped to 19 from 26 during the third quarter. Ken Griffin’s Citadel Advisors LLC reduced its position in RenaissanceRe Holdings Ltd. (NYSE:RNR) by 17% during the latest quarter to 1.23 million shares.

Let’s move on to the next page of this daily insider trading article, which discusses the insider sales registered at Range Resources Corp. (NYSE:RRC) and Manhattan Associates Inc. (NASDAQ:MANH).