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The overwhelming volume of sell transactions relative to buy transactions by company insiders over the last six months in key leading sectors of the market is the worst Alan Newman, editor of the Crosscurrents newsletter, has ever seen since he began tracking the data. The strategist looked at insider trading activity amongst the top ten companies that make up the Nasdaq such as Apple [AAPL 308.05 -0.79 (-0.26%) ], Google [GOOG 618.60 2.10 (+0.34%) ] and Amazon [AMZN 169.95 0.95 (+0.56%) ]. Then he analyzed the biggest members of the Retail HOLDRs ETF like Gap [GPS 19.68 0.32 (+1.65%) ],...

The overwhelming volume of sell transactions relative to buy transactions by company insiders over the last six months in key leading sectors of the market is the worst Alan Newman, editor of the Crosscurrents newsletter, has ever seen since he began tracking the data. The strategist looked at insider trading activity amongst the top ten companies that make up the Nasdaq such as Apple [AAPL Loading... () ], Google [GOOG Loading... () ] and Amazon [AMZN Loading... (

2010 has started off with a bang. Insiders purchased $4.5 million worth of stock (and yes, this does not include the end year transaction by such individuals as Nelson Peltz who acquired nearly 10 million shares of Legg Mason on the last day of 2009, to validate his recent board seat standstill), in the period from January 4. It should, however, comes as no surprise that in the same period selling did not moderate, and insiders offloaded $281 million in shares (yes, this accounts for the double counting of trades between various ultimately identical corporate entities, which seems to have...

COUNTRYWIDE FINANCIAL has seen a lot of insider selling in the face of declining shares... Shares of Countrywide Financial, the large mortgage banking conglomerate, has seen its shares hit by rising interest rates and the company executives seem to be cashing out. Since the beginning of March, Angelo Mozilo, chairman and chief executive officer of Countrywide Financial, has exercised options on 210,000 shares and sold the shares for a profit of $5.9 million. Mozilo currently holds 417,593 shares of the company. In the same time frame, Countrywide's chief financial officer Thomas McLaughlin sold 108,098 shares of the company for a...