Corporate insiders rang the bell on the market almost three weeks ago with elevated levels of insider selling that has far exceeded anything we have seen in well over a decade of tracking insider transactions. The level of insider selling is elevated even after we adjust for mega multi-billion dollar sales by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Since November 8, Mr. Musk has sold 9.5 million shares at an average price of $1,077, generating $10.2 billion from those sales. A third insider of a trillion dollar market cap company joined the selling spree last week with Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella selling almost exactly half of his shares over a two day period. These sales were not related to an options exercise or an established 10b5-1 plan and were his largest sales of Microsoft in more than 10 years.
On the buying side, after a nearly two month hiatus, Facebook co-founder and the CEO of Asana (ASAN) Dustin Moskovitz is back at it again, buying $37 million worth of Anana stock last week. He has been a very active buyer this year, buying stock numerous times under a 10b5-1 trading plan. I used to think Asana was mostly a project management software company but over the last few years the company has moved into adjacent markets such as marketing automation and sales management, the domain of companies like Hubspot (HUBS) and Salesforce (CRM).
At one-fourth the revenue of a company like Hubspot, Asana commands as much as half of Hubspot’s market cap because Asana is growing much faster. Revenue for fiscal Q2 2022 was up 72% year-over-year to $89.5 million and revenue for enterprise customers spending more than $50,000 grew 111% y-o-y. The company’s gross margins are improving, approaching nearly 90% and free cash flow is trending in the right direction, albeit still negative.
We wrote the following about Asana in late June,
Dustin Moskovitz is one of the co-founders of Facebook, making him the youngest self-made billionaire in history in 2011. He co-founded the productivity software company, Asana, in 2008 and the company went public through a direct listing on September 30, 2020. The “reference price” for the direct listing was $21 and it closed its first day of trading at $28.80. It has more than doubled from that first day close to $62.73.