Noteworthy Insider Selling Activity In Public Storage (PSA), Google Inc. (GOOG), and Splunk Inc. (SPLK)

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Let’s now take a look at the insider selling activity at Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), the tech giant that surely does not need an introduction. David C. Drummond, who currently serves as Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer at Google, sold 11,318 shares on August 12, after exercising 5,000 stock options to buy shares of Google. To be more detailed, David Drummond exercised 2,500 stock options to purchase Class A common stock and 2,500 stock options to purchase Class C common stock, and then sold all of them including an additional 3,159 Class A shares and 3,159 Class C shares. Following the transactions, Drummond currently owns only 18,584 Class C shares. However, this move should not raise any red flags, as David Drummond will leave Google to become Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Alphabet, Google’s new parent company.

Google has recently announced an overhaul of its corporate structure. As a result, the company that used to be called Google will now become a new holding company called Alphabet, while the current shareholders of Google will get one Alphabet share for each Google share previously-owned. In the meantime, Harris Associates is among the largest shareholders of Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), owning 2.35 million Class A shares and 762,262 Class C shares as of June 30.

Last but not least, let’s take a  look at Splunk Inc. (NASDAQ:SPLK), whose insiders also have unloaded a significant number of shares in the last couple of days. Godfrey R. Sullivan, the President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Splunk, sold 83,348 shares so far this week through multiple transactions, which included 16,668 shares on August 12 alone, remaining with 491,940 shares. David F. Conte, who currently serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Splunk, reported selling 25,700 shares during this week. Hence, David Conte now owns 112,130 shares of the company. At the same time, another Senior Vice President of the company, Guido R. Schroeder, sold 10,000 shares through three transactions on August 10 and continues to own 115,939 shares.

The shares of Splunk have gained 15% year-to-date, but analysts believe the stock is overvalued. Splunk has experienced heavy sell-offs after the last two quarterly financial releases despite beating estimates. It is believed that a small miss on earnings in the next quarter could impact the stock significantly. Therefore, we see the aforementioned insider selling activity as a bearish sign for the stock. Donald Chiboucis’ Columbus Circle Investors is one of the bullish hedge fund on Splunk Inc. (NASDAQ:SPLK) within our database, owning 1.41 million shares as of June 30.

Disclosure: None

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