Continuing the theme of corporate tea-leaf reading begun by JV with IBM, the stock movements over at Vermont Yankee’s parent, Entergy deserve a mention as well.
American Banking News reports that Donald W. Vinci, a Senior Vice President at Entergy just dumped 3,000 shares of the company’s stock.
Entergy (NYSE:ETR) SVP Donald W. Vinci sold 3,000 shares of Entergy stock in a transaction that occurred on Thursday, June 5th. The shares were sold at an average price of $78.50, for a total transaction of $235,500.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the senior vice president now directly owns 6,891 shares in the company, valued at approximately $540,944.
Mr. Vinci, who joined Entergy on September 1 of 2013, already sold 185 shares @ $63.05 per share on January 31 of this year.
It isn’t at all unusual for a man in his position to dump some of the stock or options he must have received on sign-up, but it might be taken as a lack of confidence in the future of Entergy that he has been on board less than two years and has already disposed of roughly half of his interest in the company.
Perhaps someone at Entergy thought so, too, because on the same day that Mr. Vinci sold his 3,000 shares, another SVP and Chief Accounting Officer, Allison M. Mount, acquired 72 shares of company stock. A token show of confidence, on balance?
Entergy stock is variously recommended as a “sell” or a “hold” by stock analysts, and a few even say it’s a “buy.” The consensus seems to be to “hold”…for now. So far, so good.
We want to keep a close eye on the fortunes of Entergy in the marketplace. There is a great big question mark out there as to what happens with responsibility for decommissioning costs when an LLC (which Vermont Yankee is) goes belly up. The idea of an LLC is to “limit liability” of partners and associated businesses when the LLC files for bankruptcy.
If the price they can get for nuclear generated electricity isn’t worth the operating investment, and Entergy’s leaky creaky fleet of old reactors begins to be too much of a drag on resources, the LLC’s may begin to fall like petals from a dying rose.
Corporate insiders sell stock for all kinds of reasons, and, as a general rule, they sell far more shares than they buy (the rest being granted to them, like the ones you mention from Alyson M. Mount (spelling corrected)on June 5. For those wanting to follow these machinations for Entergy, you can do so on Yahoo: http://finance.yahoo.comqit?s=… where you will learn that in the last 6 months, insiders sold 9891 shares and bought 0, a net reduction of just under 2% of insider-held shares.
To read much into this for the purposes which I assume Sue and Arnie (the source) and I care about, you’d need to look at the historical insider trading pattern at Entergy and see if this is especially unusual. My hunch, however, is that it isn’t.