A Popular Company within the Investment Community Has Several Insiders Unload Shares
FactSet Research Systems Inc. (NYSE:FDS) also witnessed some noteworthy insider selling this week, which may be interesting to the investment community. To start with, Joseph E. Laird Jr., Board member since 1993, offloaded 1,500 shares on Wednesday and 1,000 shares on Thursday at a weighted average price of $151.70, cutting his overall holding to 4,500 shares. Moreover, Chief Operating Officer Mark J. Hale sold 1,823 shares on Wednesday at $150.05 apiece, which trimmed his stake to a mere 4,969 shares.
The majority of investors and analysts already know FactSet Research Systems, which operates as a provider of financial information and analytical applications. The company’s applications enable customers to get access to company and industry analyses, multi-company comparisons, portfolio analysis, alpha-testing, portfolio optimization and simulation, among other things. In October 2015, FactSet purchased Portware LLC, a provider of multi-asset trade automation solutions for mega and large asset managers, for roughly $264.8 million. With this acquisition, FactSet’s capabilities have been expanded to include multi-asset trade automation, so it remains to see how the company’s M&A activities will drive growth in the upcoming years. The company’s revenues for the first half of fiscal 2016 that ended February 29 reached $552.30 million, which increased from $490.47 million reported for the same period of the previous year. The increase in revenues was mainly attributable to strong annual subscription value (ASV) growth, which represents growth in forward-looking revenues for the next 12 months from subscription services supplied to clients, sustained client and user additions, strong performance in the Analytics suite of products, as well as revenues from freshly-acquired Portware. At the end of February, the company registered 63,500 users using FactSet, an increase of 6,092 or 10.6% from the second quarter of fiscal 2015. FactSet has registered the fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit user growth, which shows that the company is moving in the right direction.
Shares of FactSet are down 5% since the beginning of 2016, which presumably reflects the possible impact of increased volatility and uncertainty in financial markets on the company’s financial performance. Meanwhile, the stock is priced at around 21.6-times expected earnings, significantly above the forward P/E ratio of 17.4 for the S&P 500 benchmark. The smart money sentiment towards FactSet declined in the final quarter of 2015, with the number of funds from our database invested in the company dropping to 16 from 24 quarter-on-quarter. Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies had 379,350 shares of FactSet Research Systems Inc. (NYSE:FDS) in its equity portfolio at the end of 2015.
