Daily Archive

I’ve been looking at Glen Moreno (Non exec Chairman) of Pearson (PSON, 705p) share purchases. Moreno appears to be a pretty cautious guy, buying 5000 shares at a time, so he hasn’t really hit my radar. But looking back, he has invested about £360k in 45,000 shares in Pearson since August 2007, increasing his holding by almost 50% to £1.2m. He last paid 703p on the 18th December for 10,000 shares.

Now take a look at Reed Elsevier (REL, 653p), also a FTSE100 media stock. Here we see Patrick Tierney realising £159k through a sale of 25,000 shares, taking his holding down to just 37,000 shares, worth about £243k.

Tierney is Chief Executive of Harcourt Education, a division of Reed Elsevier. He is also a pretty shrewd market operator, having exercised options over 171k shares and then sold the shares within 2% of the years high for Reed, at 676p. It appears he also sold a further 52k shares at 644p on the same day in May.

It may be that Patrick Tierney no longer has a job, as Reed have recently completed the sale of their Education division, and that is why he is selling down his position in Reed. But I would give him due credit for his trading ability, and suggest that the recent share price run in Reed is coming to an end.