Notable Insider Sales Registered at Capella Education Company (CPLA) and Two Other Companies

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A) saw three different insiders offload shares in March, but most insider sales were associated with newly-vested stock options. So let’s only examine the insider selling unrelated to freshly-exercised stock options and pre-arranged trading plans. Director Heidi Fields discarded 30,000 shares on Thursday at prices varying from $39.71 to $40.05 per share, which trimmed his ownership to 57,312 units of common stock.

Agilent Technologies is a life sciences, diagnostics and applied chemicals company that provides application-focused solutions such as instruments, software, services and consumables for laboratory workflow. The company’s primary product categories include liquid chromatography systems and components, liquid chromatography mass spectrometry systems, gas chromatography systems and components, to name just a few. At the beginning of March, the company announced an investment of $80 million in privately-held Lasargen, an emerging biotechnology company that has innovative next-generation sequencing technology. As a result, Agilent Technologies is set to own a 48% ownership stake in the Houston-based company, as well as join Lasargen’s Board of Directors. Moreover, Agilent also has the option to purchase the remaining shares of Lasargen for an additional $105 million until March 2018. Next-generation sequencing is a DNA sequencing technology that has revolutionized genomic research in recent years, which enables researchers to sequence an entire human genome within a short period of time.

Shares of Agilent are down 5% in the past 12 months and are 4% in the red thus far in 2016. The stock is priced around 18.4-times expected earnings, slightly above the forward P/E ratio for the S&P 500 benchmark. A number of 46 hedge funds from our system had long positions in the company at the end of 2015, accumulating almost 11% of its shares. Ken Griffin’s Citadel Advisors LLC upped its position in Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A) by 65% during the December quarter, ending 2015 with 3.47 million shares.

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