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Loews Corp (L): $78.69
Market Cap: $17.27B
Insider buying is starting to pick up over the last two weeks as companies report Q2 earnings, giving us a wider variety of companies that we can research for these Insider Weekends articles. In fact, many of the companies that made our top five list of insider purchases were quite interesting – ranging from the CFO of automotive giant General Motors (GM) purchasing $1.1 million worth of shares to co-founder and longtime CEO of the semiconductors solutions company MaxLinear Inc (MXL) also making a similar sized purchase.
Lamb Weston Holdings (LW) – a mid-cap food processing company that happens to be one of the world’s largest frozen potato products manufacturer – made the list as well. We wrote about Lamb Weston last October after they announced a stock buyback. The company reported another strong quarter in November and the stock eclipsed $100 before losing nearly half its value on account of two weak quarters driven by slowing restaurant traffic and a product recall.
This week we decided to look past this top five list to feature a company and insider purchase that piqued our interest on multiple levels. Loews Corp (L), not to be confused with the home improvement retailer Lowe’s (LOW), is a fascinating holding company – with businesses in the insurance, energy, hospitality and packaging industries. The company, at its core, is a long-standing family business that can trace its roots back to 1946 when Lawrence Tisch convinced his parents to purchase a hotel in New Jersey. Soon, he joined forces with his brother Robert Tisch and the two began building a hotel empire across the nation. Profits from these hotels enabled them to buy theaters after a Supreme Court antitrust case forced MGM to sell their movie theater chains, and the business kept expanding in this form – acquiring companies and operations from all sorts of industries. Soon, Loews grew into the massive conglomerate it stands as today.