Twitter insiders have been selling off their shares for months now, and last week two more of the company’s top executives sold some stock. Vice President Kevin Weil and Revenue President Adam Bain both unloaded some of their Twitter stock onto the open market.
Twitter executives sell stock
A regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicates that in a transaction this past Wednesday, Weil sold 5,354 Twitter shares at an average price of $37.77 per share. He raked in about $202,000 in that transaction. After selling that small block of shares, he was left with approximately 993,000 shares under his direct ownership. Those shares have a value of about $37.5 million.
Regulatory filings with the SEC show that Bain exercised 39,020 stock options that were set to expire on Sept. 23, 2020. He then turned around and sold them on the open market at an average price of $37.36 per share, leaving him with 572,005 shares under his direct ownership. Those shares are worth about $22.88 million based on today’s current trading levels. Bain also owns an additional 1 million shares of Twitter indirectly.
Twitter shares fueled by Google buyout talk
Last week speculations that Google might buy Twitter reappeared on Wall Street, and shares have been pushing higher ever since. Clearly investors aren’t overly convinced that this will actually happen though, as the stock hasn’t skyrocketed on the talk.
Indeed, it seems very unlikely that Google would want to buy Twitter at the current valuation. The micro-blogging platform has a market capitalization of about $25.2 billion. While Google has the cash to complete the transaction, it would take a significant chunk of its cash and make Twitter the search giant’s largest acquisition ever.
Twitter named as one of the top mean-reversion ideas for 2015
Twitter continues to be a polarizing stock on Wall Street, and analysts tend to have mixed reviews on it. According to Martin Blanc of Bidness Etc, analyst Ross Sandler of Deutsche Bank wrote in his latest report that Twitter looks to be one of this year’s best mean-reversion ideas.
He maintained his Buy rating and $60 per share price target on Twitter. He thinks Wall Street will gradually stop being so concerned about the company’s decelerating monthly user growth. The analyst adds that it’s usually a good idea to pick up a stock when it’s “most out of favor” and said he likes Twitter’s recent advertising innovations.
As of this writing, shares of Twitter were up 1.27% to $39.92 a share.
