It didn’t take long for insiders at Blue Buffalo Pet Products Inc (NASDAQ:BUFF) to cash in on their personal holdings following the IPO of their company last week: CEO Kurt Schmidt and EVP, CFO and Treasurer Michael Nathanson both sold off the entirety of their holdings in the company on Monday, Schmidt selling 239,094 shares at $20.00 each and Nathanson selling 63,758 shares, also at $20 each. Meanwhile, President and COO William Bishop Jr. also sold 548,536 shares at the same $20 level. All told, the sales racked up over $17.02 million for the executives of the pet food supplier. Shares fell by 2% under the weight of the insider selling on Monday, and are now down by 4% since the July 22 IPO. There are no known funds tracked by Insider Monkey with positions in the company at this point. It will be interesting to see the hedge fund interest in Blue Buffalo Pet Products Inc (NASDAQ:BUFF), which has been beset by legal problems due to its alleged false advertising concerning claims it made that its pet foods contain no animal by-products, which independent testing has conclusively proven otherwise. Fellow pet food producer Purina filed a lawsuit against the company last year, which is still ongoing.
Lastly is Intuitive Surgical, Inc. (NASDAQ:ISRG), which had three officers make sales on Monday. President and CEO Gary Guthart sold 17,255 shares at a hefty $541.98 each, while Senior Advisor of Commercial Ops Jerome McNamara sold 5,000 shares at $541.75 each, and SVP, General Counsel and COO Mark Meltzer sold 4,750 shares in three transactions. The sales by the three men amounted to more than $14.63 million worth of shares. The selling spree comes just days after shares shot up by nearly 9% last Wednesday following the company’s latest earnings results, which were released in the after-hours the night before. The company topped revenue and earnings estimates analysts had for it, while selling 118 of its Da Vinci surgical robot systems during the second quarter, a 22.9% increase year-over-year. The results appear to have caught hedge funds off guard, as those tracked by Insider Monkey were selling out of the stock in the first quarter of the year, with 33 funds holding $1.11 billion in the company’s stock on March 31, down from 42 funds and $1.24 billion respectively, as of December 31. Although it should be added that the smart money was not necessarily wrong, as shares did decline by about 4% during the second quarter, and we don’t yet know their sentiment heading into the third, during which shares have now greatly rebounded. Samuel Isaly‘s Orbimed Advisors healthcare fund was the largest shareholder of Intuitive Surgical, Inc. (NASDAQ:ISRG) among those funds as of March 31, holding 409,700 shares.
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