In an unusually volatile week, we saw significant market weakness earlier in the week probably driven by forced selling and a relief rally in the end. Insiders once again stepped up their purchases to take advantage of prices, which in some cases are down anywhere from 50% to 90% from their peaks. While overall insider buying went up by a little over $11 million last week, both the number of insiders and the number of companies with insider buying went up significantly. The last week of April saw 207 insiders across 98 companies purchase shares. This went up to 407 insiders across 169 companies in the first week of May and 584 insiders purchasing stock across 281 companies last week.
We wrote about Uber in our Broken Growth series of articles on Friday, May 6th and incidentally the same day, Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi happened to buy 200,000 shares for $5.35 million as detailed in a form 4 filing filed on Monday, May 9th. We wrote the following about Uber in that article,
The appeal with Uber has always been that the network and software they built could be expanded to other verticals and we saw this play out in delivery with restaurants first and then with groceries. The company recently expanded its partnership with Albertsons (ACI) and its various brands including Safeway, Randalls, etc. to over 2,000 stores. This shift to delivery helped the company in a material way during the early phases of the pandemic when their mobility division took a big hit.
The new vertical with a lot of potential for Uber is freight, where they connect shippers like Costco, CVS, Walgreens, Home Depot, H.E.B, Colgate-Palmolive, P&G and Abbott with carriers. While freight represented less than 7% of Uber’s gross bookings of $26.45 billion in Q1 2022, the division is growing rapidly.
In case you missed it, Mr. Khosrowshahi’s letter to employees highlighting the renewed focus on generating free cash flow is worth reading. If the company can demonstrate that it can generate free cash flow instead of chasing growth at all costs, investors might warm up to the stock, which continued dropping last week.