It seems the great trading edge enjoyed by corporate insiders is knowing when to sell. That makes sense. There are many brokers and business-TV guests with stock buying tips, but few who will urge you to sell now, before the bad news comes out.
But we are probably coming to the end of a great couple of decades for legalised insider trading in America. This boom really started with a 2002 “reform”, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s adoption of Rule 10b5-1. This provided a means for senior executives or board members to sell their shares without making themselves vulnerable to charges of acting on “material non public information”.
New SEC chief Gary Gensler has called for reform of the rule, telling a Wall Street Journal conference that it led to “real cracks in our insider-trading regime”.
The rule was issued, as is customary with major reforms, in the wake of a series of giant corporate scandals — in this case those that came to light after the dotcom crash of 2000-2001. You know, pump earnings, goose the stock, dump your shares. Never again.
To qualify for protection under 10b5-1, covered insiders could no longer sell their companies’ shares at will. They have to enter into a (non-binding) contract, or plan, that instructs a third party to execute trades on their behalf according to a written plan, based on value, timing, number of shares, and so on. The stock sales under these plans would then be disclosed to the SEC and then the general public.
At the time, this seemed like a reasonable way to ensure market transparency while allowing insiders to sell shares to make tax payments, buy houses, or cover school tuition. Plans + disclosure + aligned interests = good.
In practice, Rule 10b5-1 has turned out to be a “get out of jail free” card for opportunistic timing of stock sales using insider information. It is also probably a good object lesson for why $4,000/hour lawyers are a better value than $400/hour lawyers.
To begin with, you, the insider, must follow a plan, detailed in a SEC Form 144, which you adopt at a time when you are not in possession of material non-public information. That would include, for example, certain knowledge that the next earnings announcement will be disappointing for the public shareholders.
Ah, but while you have to establish the plan with, say, your broker or family lawyer, you can modify or cancel the plan at will, in private. And you are not required to inform the SEC or the public that the plan is in place. Even better, there is no minimum number of transactions, so you can use it to make one big sale.
And you can file your plan (when you are ready) on a paper form, rather than in an easily accessed online filing. Until the pandemic, the 10b5-1s were only available for a limited time in the SEC’s Reading Room. It is possible, even likely, that an insider’s pre-filed plan might become general knowledge only after their stock sale has already been executed by his broker.
Mostly the insiders appear to be getting out before bad news is disclosed.
Daniel Taylor, a Wharton School associate professor and director of the Wharton Forensic Analytics Lab, has co-authored a series of studies on data combed from the 10b5-1 filings. He says “the sellers’ outperformance (in timing trades) comes from avoidance of risk”.
According to one of his studies, sales executed in the first 30 days of plan adoption are associated with the stocks underperforming others in their industry by 2.5 percentage points over the following six months.
Sales made 30 to 60 days after a plan adoption foreshadow 1.5 points of underperformance by the insiders’ companies. The sell-off effect was consistent over the 2016-2020 period covered by the study. The insider advantage disappears if sales are made under plans that are at least 60 days old.
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As Taylor (and others) see it, the policy lesson is clear: insiders should be required to wait for at least two months after filing their plans publicly before their stock sales can be executed. Oh, and those plans should be filed in easily accessible electronic form, so insiders’ lessened commitment to their companies becomes obvious before the bad news.
The odds favour the SEC’s adoption of such changes.
The next frontier, Taylor says, is to limit insiders’ use of privileged information about competitors, suppliers, customers and the like. That “shadow trading” is probably a bigger rip-off than insider selling.
