Analysts often follow the buying trends of company insiders because, after all, they have more information about their companies than anyone else.
We ran a screen on low-debt dividend stocks, paying dividend yields above 2% and sustainable payout ratios below 35%. We screened these companies for those that have seen significant net insider buying over the last six months.
Interactive Chart: Press Play to compare changes in analyst ratings over the last two years for the stocks mentioned below. Analyst ratings sourced from Zacks Investment Research.
We also created a price-weighted index of the stocks mentioned below, and monitored the performance of the list relative to the S&P 500 index over the last month.
(Click chart for more detail)
Do you think insiders are calling it right on these names? Use this list as a starting-off point for your own analysis.
List sorted by net insider purchases as a percent of share float.
1. Everest Re Group Ltd. (RE): Property & Casualty Insurance Industry. Market cap of $4.39B. Dividend yield at 2.38%, payout ratio at 19.87%. MRQ total debt to assets at 0.05. Net insider purchases over the last six months at 1.25M, which is 2.84% of the company's 44.06M share float. The stock has gained 4.7% over the last year.
2. A. Schulman, Inc. (SHLM): Specialty Chemicals Industry. Market cap of $558.51M. Dividend yield at 3.43%, payout ratio at 25.73%. MRQ total debt to assets at 0.16. Net insider purchases over the last six months at 21.42K, which is 0.07% of the company's 29.85M share float. It's been a rough couple of days for the stock, losing 6.7% over the last week.
3. UMB Financial Corporation (UMBF): Regional Banks Industry. Market cap of $1.51B. Dividend yield at 2.10%, payout ratio at 30.01%. MRQ total debt to assets at 0.12. Net insider purchases over the last six months at 15.41K, which is 0.05% of the company's 32.20M share float. The stock is a short squeeze candidate, with a short float at 6.35% (equivalent to 12.11 days of average volume). It's been a rough couple of days for the stock, losing 6.06% over the last week.
4. First Interstate Bancsystem Inc. (FIBK): Regional Banks Industry. Market cap of $511.22M. Dividend yield at 3.79%, payout ratio at 20.15%. MRQ total debt to assets at 0.08. Net insider purchases over the last six months at 6.73K, which is 0.05% of the company's 13.24M share float. It's been a rough couple of days for the stock, losing 8.11% over the last week.
*Dividend data and total debt to assets data sourced from Screener.co, insider data sourced from Yahoo! Finance, all other data sourced from Finviz.
Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.
