David T Merrill - Insider Trading Tracker

Introduction

This page provides a comprehensive analysis of the known insider trading history of David T Merrill. Insiders are officers, directors, or significant investors in a company. It is illegal for insiders to make trades in their companies based on specific, non-public information. This does not mean it is illegal for them to make any trades in their own companies. However, they must report all trades to the SEC via a Form 4. Despite these restrictions, academic research suggests that insiders - in general - tend to outperform the market in their own companies.

Average Trade Profitability

Companies with Reported Insider Positions

The SEC filings indicate David T Merrill has reported holdings or trades in the following companies:

How to Interpret the Charts

The following charts show the stock performance of securities subsequent to each open-market, non-planned trade made by David T Merrill. Non-planned trade are trades that were not made as part of a 10b5-1 trading plan. The stock performance is charted as cumulative percent change in share price. For example, if an insider trade was made on January 1, 2019, the chart will show the daily percent change of the security to the present day. If the share price were to go from $10 to $15 during this time, the cumulative percent change in share price would be 50%. A change in price from $10 to $20 would be 100%, and a change in price of $10 to $5 would be -50%.

Ultimately, we are trying to determine how closely the insider’s trades correlate to excess returns (positive or negative) in the share price in order to see if the insider is timing their trades to profit from insider information. Consider the situation where an insider was doing this. In this situation, we would expect either (a) positive returns after purchases, or (b) negative returns after sales. In the case of (a), the PURCHASE chart would show a series of upwardly sloping curves, indicating positive returns after each purchase transaction. In the case of (b), the SALE chart would show a series of downward sloping curves, indicating negative returns after each sale transaction.

However, this alone is not enough to draw conclusions. If, for example, the share price of the company was in a non-cyclical climb over many years, then we would expect all the post-purchase plots to be upwardly sloping. Likewise, non-cyclical declines over many years would result in downward sloping post-trade plots. Neither of these charts would suggest insider trading activity.

The strongest indicator would be a situation where the share price was extremely cyclical, and there were both positive signals in the PURCHASE chart and negative plots on the SALE chart. This situation would be highly suggestive of an insider that was timing trades to their financial advantage.

Insider Trading History

This table shows the complete list of insider trades made by David T Merrill as disclosed to the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC).