Corporate insiders are more bearish than they have been in decades.
That’s worrisome, since insiders presumably know more about their companies’ prospects than the rest of us do
In July, they sold far more of their companies’ shares than they bought. Most Read from MarketWatch Consider the measure of insider sentiment favored by Nejat Seyhun, a finance professor at the University of Michigan and a leading expert on interpreting insider behavior. This measure is the number of companies with net buying from corporate officers and directors, expressed as a percentage of all companies that had any buying or selling from those insiders.
For July through Wednesday, this indicator stands at 14.8%. If that turns out to be the full-month percentage, it would be the lowest level in at least 21 years, Seyhun said in an email. That’s ominous enough, but there’s more.