RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Insider sold 1.1 million shareHi David,
I am new to the board and certainly not an expert but I offer a few personal observations.
According to SEDI there are only 3 company insider / owners holding in excess of 1.1M shares. BT @ 2,294,081 and LT @ 1,285,679 and Doug Marlin @ 3,123,034. ) apparantly no net changes here so B&L were not involved.
Doug Marlin (Audit Committee, Compensation Committee)
Mr. Marlin has been President of Marlin Ventures Inc., a Canadian-based consulting firm, since January 1997. He is a Director of Zed.i Solutions Inc. (TSX.V: ZED) as well as a Director for JDA Software Group Inc (Nasdaq: JDAS). Mr. Marlin was previously President of JDA Software Ltd. from 1981 to 1996.
Also according to SEDI there have been zero insider sales during calendar 2009 with the sole exception being B&L T doing the recent private conversion of 1,131,315 @ .525 to 1,131,315 @ .5 including the .75 1/2 warrant associated with the recent 8M share offering through MAX Capital, which to me is obviously not really an insider sale. During Dec 2008 there were insider dispositions but all of these were expiring out of the money options.
The 1.1M disposition on Dec 7th occurred right at the end of the trading day and was not a public offer for sale but a private deal of some kind (?). I know because I had a significant order in at .55 but only acquired 500 shares but was surprised to see that there was no bid of 1.1M @.55 but someone else acquired these shares and my order was not filled? Apparantly I don't know much about the but/sell lattitude available to insiders?
I will watch insider sales closely going forward, but my thinking is that if I was an insider with a significant investment, and ... I thought the prospects for the company were good I would ant to dispurse that holding to someone else - perhaps someone in my family like my spouse. That way if/when AMA rises as anticipated there are all kinds of family/tax benefits with a shift/balancing in ownership.
This kind of transaction is the only thing that makes sense to me .. per info to date? But do insiders have the latitude to do private block deals which exclude retail? Theres a lot I don't know, but given the complete absense of insider sales to date during 2009 I'm thinking that this sale is 100% personal portfolio management as opposed to any signal of insider perceived weakness/risk in AMA going forward (of course we know there is still fairly significant execution risk).
Short term (Q4), I expect no contract announcements from AMA unless they are SNC related (the fact there have been no SNC anouncements to date is disconcerting, and the possibility of a 'military market' conflict with L3 is also a concern. Yes I know what the SNC/L3 respective contract focus is but that doesn't change the fact that L3 is 10X in US military over SNC and may covet that market as well.
Any info on insider trading rules/books on insider insight would be appreciated. I may be wrong but I expect the larger players to sit well into Q1 while price (may drop on lack of news), then AMA will have had time to work with L3 to get some real deals in place for late Q1 and get the broader investment community interested. Hopefully I'm wrong and significant news comes earlier?
Sorry for the long post.
Dan
PS> David your posts are always informative and respectful .. much appreciated
PSS> I wonder what I'm missing?