Insiders Stock Up On These 5 Stocks Ahead Of Year's End

Like investors in general, insiders have been looking to position themselves to squeeze out any final gains for the year and prepare for 2016. Ongoing volatility does not appear to have dried up the level of insider purchases, perhaps a good sign as we head into the new year. Conventional wisdom says that insiders and 10 percent owners really only buy shares of a company for one reason -- they believe the stock price will rise and they want to profit from it. It should be no surprise that executives, directors and others are likely to continue taking advantage of any weakness they see.

Two directors acquired

shares at $17.00 apiece last week. The total for those more than 2.3 million shares cost them more than $40 million, and the buys followed the announcement of

earlier in the month. The market cap of this in vitro diagnostics company is about $1.1 billion, but note that short interest is more than 17 percent of the float. The short sellers have watched the share price jump more than 23 percent in the past month, and late on Monday the stock was trading at $21.51.

Japanese trading company Marubeni continues scooping up batches of jet-rental company

, as it has done for more than a year. That included more than 356,000 of them in the past week at prices that ranged from $19.46 to $20.33 apiece, or a total of around $7.1 million. Aircastle's market cap is about $1.7 billion, and its shareholders enjoy a dividend yield of about 4.8 percent. The share price has yet to fully recover from a post-earnings sell-off in early November. The stock was trading at $20.16 on Monday afternoon.

Recently, the chief executive bought about $6.6 million worth of

, or more than 124,000 shares at $29.85 apiece. Earlier in the month, the biotech company

to produce a chemical used in the manufacture of spandex and polyester. Note that this $3.6 million market cap company has short interest of more than 12 percent of its total float. The stock has lost more than half of its value since last August. Shares were trading at $31.40 per share Friday afternoon, so the CEO's move appears to be well-timed.

The CEO, CFO and COO together picked up more than a million

shares recently at between $6.21 and $6.60 per share. The total for those transactions came to almost $7 million. The CEO's stake rose to more than 7 million shares. This business development company has a market cap near $2.4 billion and a dividend yield of about 15.0 percent. Shares saw a multiyear low closing price earlier this month, but they have recovered more than 7% since and were trading on Monday at $6.77. These appear to have been well-timed buys.

Two directors bought more than 593,000 shares of this operator of the Burger King and Tim Horton's chains. The shares ranged in price from $34.30 to $36.52, and the transactions totaled more than $20 million. Burger King continues to take

. The market cap of

is around $8.0 billion, and the dividend yield is about 1.4 percent. Shares were trading at $36.37 on Monday, up less than 3 percent in the past week while the broader markets lost ground.

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