Notable Insider Buys: Novartis, T-Mobile And More

• Insider buying can be an encouraging signal for potential investors.
• The executive chair of a petroleum production company returned to the buy window last week.
• A former director and a former 10% owner also made notable purchases.

Conventional wisdom says that insiders and 10% owners really only buy shares of a company for one reason — they believe the stock price will rise and they want to profit. So insider buying can be an encouraging signal for potential investors, particularly during periods of uncertainty.

Insiders continued to add shares despite overall market volatility and economic uncertainty. Here are some of the most noteworthy insider purchases reported in the past week.

Continental Resources

Continental Resources, Inc. CLR saw its founder and executive chair Harold Hamm return and purchase more than 3.13 million additional shares. At per-share prices between $15.18 and $17.92, that totaled more than $52.37 million. His stake is up to 9.61 million shares. The total float is about 74.5 million shares.

Analysts at UBS raised their price target last week.

Continental Resources stock rose more than 21% last week and was last seen at $18.30 a share. That is above Hamm's most recent purchase price range. The share price is up over 23% since the year-to-date low back in early March.

T-Mobile

Softbank Executive Chair Ron Fisher, a recently resigned T-Mobile Us Inc TMUS director, also stepped up to the buy window last week. He indirectly picked up 350,000 shares of this wireless services provider for $103 each. That cost him $36.05 million.

T-Mobile has divested its Sprint Prepaid business as part of its merger agreement. T-Mobile stock closed up fractionally last week to $106.01 a share, nearly 3% above Fisher's purchase price. The stock is more than 56% higher than the year-to-date low during the pandemic panic selling in March.

Novartis

A former 10% owner purchased 125,000 Novartis AG NVS shares last week. The share price was $17, and the total for the transaction came to more than $2.12 million. That brought the stake to over 1.18 million shares, and it came on the heels of the settlement of a $678-million bribery lawsuit.

Novartis stock ended last week at $87.57, in the same neighborhood as where it started the week. While the share price is about 21% higher since its year-to-date low in March, it is still well below its consensus price target of $104. That estimate is based on the response of just three analysts, though.

See also: Insider Sells Ambarella's Stock

Furthermore, note that there was some amount of insider buying at Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN, Cardtronics PLC CATM and Principal Financial Group Inc PFG last week as well.

At the time of this writing, the author had no position in the mentioned equities.

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