Wells Fargo & Co (WFC) and Two Other Giant Companies with Intensive Insider Selling

Wells Fargo Witnessed Multiple Insiders Sell Shares This Week

Wells Fargo & Co (NYSE:WFC) had two executives offload massive blocks of shares earlier this week. To begin with, James M. Strother, Senior Executive Vice President of the General Counsel Legal Group at Wells Fargo, sold 40,000 shares on Wednesday for $50.77 each, cutting his ownership to 218,584 shares. Moreover, Avid Modjtabai, Senior Executive Vice President of Well Fargo’s Consumer Lending Group and Operations Group, unloaded 55,000 shares on the same day at prices that fell between $50.77 and $50.81 per share, all of which were held through a trust fund that currently owns 364,802 shares.

The third-largest bank in the U.S. based on assets has seen its market value decline almost 8% since the beginning of 2016. The bank’s revenues for the first quarter of this year were $22.2 billion, which increased 4% year-on-year mainly due to the acquisition of loan books from General Electric Company (NYSE:GE)’s GE Capital. Meanwhile, first-quarter net income declined to $5.46 billion from $5.80 billion reported last year. Let us remind you that Wells Fargo was among the five banks whose so-called living wills, which represent plans explaining how banks would go bankrupt without destabilizing the financial system, were “not credible or would not facilitate an orderly resolution” in a possible crisis. As a result, the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporations requested the five banks, including Wells Fargo, to re-design their living wills by October 2016.

Well Fargo’s stock is priced at 11.4-times expected earnings, slightly above the forward PE multiple of 10.9 for the Diversified Banks sector. Earlier this week, the bank announced an increase of its quarterly dividend by 1% to $0.38 per share, which equates to a dividend yield of 3.04%. Ken Fisher’s Fisher Asset Management owns 19.10 million shares of Wells Fargo & Co (NYSE:WFC) as of March 31.

Disclosure: None