Legendary Railroad Executive Offloads Huge Amount of Shares After Announcing Decision to Retire from Canadian Pacific Railway, Plus Other Insider Trading

Executive at Open-Source Software Firm Sells Shares

One member of Red Hat Inc. (NYSE:RHT)’s management team unloaded some shares last week as well. DeLisa K. Alexander, Chief People Officer and Executive Vice President, sold 16,712 shares on Friday at prices varying from $73.62 to $73.75 per share. Ms. Alexander offloaded an additional 2,150 shares last week, of which 785 shares were withheld to satisfy tax obligations. The Chief People Officer currently owns an aggregate of 37,373 after the recent sale.

The shares of the open-source software firm are up 3% in the past year despite suffering a major pullback in mid-December, when the company released lower than expected third-quarter results and announced the departure of CFO Frank Calderoni. Although CFO departures raise red flags on most occasions, Red Hat Inc. (NYSE:RHT)’s CFO left the company to take the CEO role of business software company Anaplan. The company revenue for the three months that ended November 30 grew by 17.5% year-on-year to 615.3 million. Ken Griffin’s Citadel Advisors LLC had 3.05 million shares of Red Hat Inc. (NYSE:RHT) in its equity portfolio at the end of the third quarter.

Director at Cybersecurity and Data Storage Company Offloads Shares

The insider selling activity at Barracuda Networks Inc. (NYSE:CUDA) has been intensifying as of late, with some sales conducted under pre-arranged trading plans. So let’s have a quick look at the spur-of-the-moment insider selling only. Lead independent director Jeffrey R. Allen, who has served on the company’s boardroom since June 2007, liquidated 15,000 shares on Friday at prices that fell between $22.99 and $23.13 per share, all of which were held directly by the Jeffry & Terry Allen Revocable Trust. After the recent sale, Mr. Allen currently owns a total of 138,365 shares through the aforementioned trust.

Barracuda Networks Inc. (NYSE:CUDA), which designs and delivers easy-to-use security and data protection solutions, has seen its market capitalization spike by 116% over the past 12 months. The insider selling comes shortly after the cybersecurity and data storage company released strong third-quarter financial results. Following the earnings release, analysts at Baird raised their price target on Barracuda Networks to $31 from $29, saying that the company was” transitioning its model to a cloud-based model faster than most across the IT landscape” and that its penetration of the Fortune 1000 rose by 10 customers sequentially to more than 50. This reflects “the up-market opportunity facilitated by the public cloud.” Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies LLC reported owning 551,200 shares of Barracuda Networks Inc. (NYSE:CUDA) in its 13F filing for the third quarter.

Disclosure: None