JPMorgan Chase & Company (JPM): $264.24
Market Cap: $738.84B
Enterprise Value: $723.84B
We’re no longer in the quiet period where insider activity slows due to earnings release season, but this past week, we still saw aggregate insider buying drop to just $82.97 million. Insider selling, on the other hand, remained elevated at $2.55 billion. We don’t typically discuss insider sales and tend to highlight insider purchases in these articles instead since we find purchases to be a stronger signal. Insiders may sell stock for a number of reasons – whether that be for tax purposes, to fund a large purchase like a new vacation home, or simply because they keep receiving RSUs and don’t want to hold onto the excess stock. The theory is that insiders should only buy shares for a single reason – they believe the stock price will rise, but even that can be debated. Generally speaking though, insider purchases hold more weight when compared to sales.
Ever so often though, we’ll come across a sale of a company that is particularly noteworthy. This week – when we saw multiple sales at the largest bank in the United States (and the largest bank in the world by market cap) we thought they were worth a closer look.