Insider fund buying

It’s always interesting to track who in fund land is eating their own cooking or more accurately insiders buying fund stock. I’d argue that’s especially the case at the moment with markets looking a bit fragile. Investec usually make a big deal of insider purchases but this week investment bank Liberum have stepped up to the plate, screening for insider net buying and selling activity greater than £10k during September across the funds universe.

Notable activity according to Liberum includes:

• 3i Group – two senior management professionals acquired a total of 125k shares for a total consideration of £1.6m.
• BH Macro – £0.8m of insider buying in September relates to share acquisitions by two board members
• Pershing Square – £0.4m of shares acquired by one of the recently appointed board members
• AVI Japan Opportunity Trust – additional purchase of 100k shares, bringing the manager’s total shareholding to 875k shares.

I think the BH Macro and AVI Japan Opportunity Trust purchases are significant.  Both offer very real diversification benefits  – most obviously BH – and the timing of these substantial purposes is I think quite telling.

Individual stocks that could diversify a portfolio

Sticking with that diversification theme, as promised in my Citywire column, I’m publishing the results of a similar screen – low FTSE correlations, lowish beta, half decent total returns – for individual stocks. The numbers come from a data mine using Sharepad. For ease of reading I’ve broken the numbers into two tables below.

I’m not making any comment on the individual stocks ! Do your own due diligence !