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Medidata Solutions Witnessed Increased Insider Selling This Week

Medidata Solutions Inc. (NASDAQ:MDSO) had four different executives sell shares this week, with three of them conducting transactions under pre-arranged trading plans. Eileen M. Schloss, Executive Vice President of Human Resources, sold 68,717 shares on Monday on the open market this Monday at prices that fell between $46.50 and $47.01 per share, which cut her ownership stake to 22,361 shares.

The provider of a platform of cloud-based solutions for life sciences has seen its market value decline nearly 8% since the beginning of 2016. The company’s top-line results have been on an uptrend in the past several years, with total revenues increasing to $392.51 million in 2015 from $335.07 million in 2014, $276.85 million in 2013, and $218.35 million in 2012. Medidata experienced strong growth in subscription revenues, which accounted for 86% of total revenues last year, in 2015 and 2014 due to increased sales to existing large and mid-market customers, both from renewals and adoption of additional solutions offered by its technology platform (e.g. offerings for coding, randomization, trial supply management, among others). Medidata recently reported first-quarter total revenues of $104.24 million, so the company is on track to achieve its 2016 revenues guidance of $450.0 million-to-$474.0 million.

The shares of Medidata are currently changing hands at around 36.4-times expected earnings, significantly above the forward P/E multiple of 18.8 for the Nasdaq 100 Index. The number of hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey with long positions in Medidata dropped to 13 from 17 during the December quarter. ShearLink Capital, headed by former Viking Global trader Vivek Mehta, owned 464,446 shares of Medidata Solutions Inc. (NASDAQ:MDSO) at the end of December.