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Alison Carnwath last Friday invested just shy of £1m in Land Securities (LAND, 1580p). Carnwath (bio) has held the position of non exec director since April 2004, and this appears to be her first major purchase in that time.
Previous insiders buying Lands shares have included Myners (non exec Chairman), Ellis (Executive Director) and Salway (CEO), who all bought back in July last year, at prices only about 10% higher than today.
The real estate sector is up about 11% since its low in mid November, when we started to comment on directors buys in the sector, whereas the FT All Share index has fallen by 4%.
If you look at the ratio of net activity in the sector, net buys (above £50k) number 26 companies in the sector now, versus net sells (above £50k) only four, taken over the last three months. This in itself remains a pretty strong signal to stay invested in the real estate sector.
Graeme Gordon, son of the founder of Liberty Intl (LII, 958p) Sir Donald Gordon, and Non Executive Director, has invested £250k in Liberty International shares at 992p.
I looked back at historic trading, and Gordon nailed this one back in May 2006, when he bought 43,000 shares at 1001p. By the end of the year he was up 40% on that trade. His co directors started selling ap at the £14 level in late 2006 early 2007, and have sold down to 1120p in late 2007.
So yes, Gordons trade looks interesting from a timing point of view.
BUT – why bother? He’s already got £15m in Liberty shares in his own name, and must have claims on a significant portion of the ‘Gordon Family Interests’ £730m worth of Liberty Intl shares.
So even though this looks interesting, I’m going to discount the value of this signal due the the tiny increase in share ownership by Gordon. Now if he invested £5m, that would be a different matter…..
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.
Fabiola Arredondo clearly believes in this story. Enough to commit to Experian (EXPN, 414p) a further £232k last Friday at 416p, on top of £176k invested at similar levels back on the 16th and 20th of November.
I said in my post on Experian of 29/11 that I would like to see Fitzpatrick, another non exec, committing more capital. Maybe last Wednesdays investment of £86k by non exec Alan Jebson makes up for that.
To summarise then, we’ve seen four non execs commit a total of just shy of £1.1m to Experian shares in the last three weeks, at between 410p and 431p.
My sunburnt nose tells me there’s a very nice story developing here, and I’m off to buy some EXPN for myself.
Today FT.com reports on RBS: ‘ Sir Fred Goodwin, chief executive, said the bank had been “comparatively unaffected” by turbulence in world markets and the write-down because of credit market moves would be a net £950m in the second half. This is below the £1bn to £2bn range of expectations.’
On November 12th followthedirectors reported: ‘Strong message from RBS’. ‘Five non exec directors of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) last week bought shares at between 403p and 423p. They increased their shareholdings by a significant amount, by between 25 and 150%, and put in between £40k and £495k of their own money.
I went on to comment that ‘For a bank which is supposedly sitting on possible losses of several billion pounds this is certainly interesting behaviour. It also signals to me that the market has oversold RBS in anticipation of the disclosure of these losses.’
So, friends, did the market listen to the strong message that the RBS directors were sending? Mostly, yes.
The FTSE over that period is up from 6300 to 6500, a rise of 3%
Since my report on November 12th in the am, RBS are up from 402p open, or 406p where I bought them that morning, to 493p now, a rise of 21%.
And while I’m blowing my trumpet, in the same post I suggested a switch (or short position) out of Standard Chartered and HSBC into Barclays and RBS.
If you (or I for that matter) had done this, then your long positions would be up on average 19% (RBS 21%, Barc 17%) and your short positions up on average 8% (Stan 15%, HSBC 1%), a return of 11%. Go back to my post of November 12th for director dealing driven signals that prompted this suggested trade.
CFO of Next (NXT, 1740p) David Keens increased his holding in the group by 10,000 shares to 145,000 shares this week, at 1711p, investing around £171k.
Is this significant? Maybe. If you assume that Shirley Keens and David Keens speak with each other, and their finances are related, then this purchase partly reverses a sale by Shirley Keens of 45,000 shares at 2245p on April 17th this year, raising £1m. However the press release at the time claimed that Shirley Keens ‘manages her assets independently’ of Mr Keens.
Simon Wolfson, CEO, in March raised over £3.5m by selling 160,000 shares at prices between 2303p and 2309p.
Another recent buyer is Christos Angelides (exec director), who was credited with being a ‘weather forecaster’ in the last week of July, investing £180k ahead of a desperately needed sunny weekend. Next shares rallied by £3 to £22 in the three months after his purchase. Last week Steve Barber (non exec) also stepped up, but invested only £8,000.
Why am I not totally convinced? Because Keens has only increased his holding by about 8%, and I’d like to see a little more commitment from both him and other directors in the sector, where we’ve seen purchases by directors of WHSmith, Lookers and Pendragon in the last week.
Over the last two weeks two non exec directors at Experian have been buying up shares, at between 410p and 427p (close last night 427.75p). They are Fabiola Arredondo, who was MD of Yahoo Europe between 1997 and 2001, and Sean Fitzpatrick, previously CEO of Anglo Irish Bank.
Fitzpatrick committed a miserly £70k to Experian shares this week. I say miserly because last week he spent Euro 500k buying Anglo Irish shares, in which he now has a Eu 50m position. I’d like to see a bit more commitment to Experian from Fitzpatrick.
Arredondo meanwhile committed £176k to Experian. This is her first real purchase since the company was demerged from GUS in October 2006
Another Non Exec, who has been quietly buying shares, is Roger Davis, ex CEO of Barclays UK. He has invested between £600-650k at prices between 410p and 430p, over the last two months.
Also to note: Competitor Equifax in the US (EFX) is 20% off its highs this year, Experian (EXPN) around 35% down.
This is definitely a space to watch.
followthedirectors... a study of directors share dealings 