Notable Insider Buys This Past Week: HP, UPS And More

• Insider buying can be an encouraging signal for potential investors.
• Some insiders took advantage of a secondary offering last week.
• Two chief executives also have stepped up to the buy window.

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 global economic gloom. The following are some of the most noteworthy insider purchases reported in the past week.

Pinnacle Financial Partners

Pinnacle Financial Partners Inc PNFP saw an executive and three directors take advantage of a secondary offering and purchase 116,000 depositary shares altogether. At a per-share price of $25, that totaled $2.9 million. Note that two of those directors also bought shares back in March.

Shares of this Nashville-based bank holding company popped more than 16% in last week's trading to end at $47.14 each. The share price is up over 39% since its year-to-date low during the pandemic sell-off in March. Yet it is still more than 26% lower than at the beginning of the year.

UPS

United Parcel Service, Inc. UPS CEO Carol Tome stepped up to the buy window recently. She picked up 10,100 shares of this Atlanta-based company for an average of $99.33 each. That cost her more than $1 million. Tome's stake was listed as 13,036 shares.

This buy came about the same time UPS added new fees to manage the surge in e-commerce shipments. The stock rose nearly 7% last week, a bit more than the Dow Jones industrials, and closed most recently at $106.65 per share. It is now more than 21% higher than the year-to-date low in March.

HP

CEO Enrique Lores and another director together purchased 30,500 HP Inc HPQ shares last week. Share prices ranged from $15.03 to $15.85, and the total for these transactions came to around $464,300. Lores' stake was last seen at 397,150 shares.

Goldman Sachs recently listed HP as an oversold S&P 500 stock. Shares ended last week up almost 15% to $17.41, well above the purchase prices mentioned above. The share price is almost 21% higher since its year-to-date low in March, and it is approaching its consensus price target of $17.69.

See also: Bulls And Bears Of The Week: Gilead, Shopify, Tesla And More

In addition, note that there was some insider buying at CME Group Inc CME and General Motors Company GM last week as well.

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

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