In This Article:
It is usually uneventful when a single insider buys stock. However, When quite a few insiders buy shares, as it happened in The Artisanal Spirits Company plc's (LON:ART) case, it's fantastic news for shareholders.
While we would never suggest that investors should base their decisions solely on what the directors of a company have been doing, logic dictates you should pay some attention to whether insiders are buying or selling shares.
Check out our latest analysis for Artisanal Spirits
The Last 12 Months Of Insider Transactions At Artisanal Spirits
In the last twelve months, the biggest single purchase by an insider was when Independent Non-Executive Chairman of the Board Mark Hunter bought UK£48k worth of shares at a price of UK£0.39 per share. That implies that an insider found the current price of UK£0.41 per share to be enticing. That means they have been optimistic about the company in the past, though they may have changed their mind. While we always like to see insider buying, it's less meaningful if the purchases were made at much lower prices, as the opportunity they saw may have passed. Happily, the Artisanal Spirits insiders decided to buy shares at close to current prices.
Happily, we note that in the last year insiders paid UK£113k for 270.67k shares. But insiders sold 45.03k shares worth UK£19k. In the last twelve months there was more buying than selling by Artisanal Spirits insiders. You can see a visual depiction of insider transactions (by companies and individuals) over the last 12 months, below. If you click on the chart, you can see all the individual transactions, including the share price, individual, and the date!
Artisanal Spirits is not the only stock insiders are buying. So take a peek at this free list of under-the-radar companies with insider buying.
Artisanal Spirits Insiders Are Selling The Stock
Over the last three months, we've seen a bit of insider selling at Artisanal Spirits. Non-Executive Director Mark Francis Bedingham divested only UK£19k worth of shares in that time. It's not great to see insider selling, nor the lack of recent buyers. But the selling simply isn't sufficiently substantial to be of much use as a signal.
Insider Ownership
Another way to test the alignment between the leaders of a company and other shareholders is to look at how many shares they own. I reckon it's a good sign if insiders own a significant number of shares in the company. Insiders own 29% of Artisanal Spirits shares, worth about UK£8.3m. We've certainly seen higher levels of insider ownership elsewhere, but these holdings are enough to suggest alignment between insiders and the other shareholders.