Thursday, October 3, 2019

Selling but Not Buying

There's a strange phenomenon in the stock market right now: Corporate share sales have surged to a  four and a half year high at the same time corporate buying has dropped.

Corporate executives unloaded $14.2 billion worth of their companies’ stock last month through September 26, according to a TrimTabs analysis. That’s the highest of any September in the past 10 years. September also marked the sixth month this year that insider selling has topped $10 billion, which is already the most months to cross that threshold since 2006.

Meanwhile, overall corporate demand for shares, in the form of stock buybacks and cash mergers and acquisitions, has dropped. Share repurchase volume was $145.9 billion in the third quarter, just a little over half the $281 billion worth of stock repurchased in the second quarter. It was the lowest quarterly total since the third quarter of 2017.

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