Have Insiders Sold SmartFinancial Shares Recently?

We'd be surprised if SmartFinancial, Inc. (NYSE:SMBK) shareholders haven't noticed that the Independent Director, Steven Tucker, recently sold US$173k worth of stock at US$49.50 per share. However, the silver lining is that the sale only reduced their total holding by 6.9%, so we're hesitant to read anything much into it, on its own.

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SmartFinancial Insider Transactions Over The Last Year

In fact, the recent sale by Independent Director Steven Tucker was not their only sale of SmartFinancial shares this year. Earlier in the year, they fetched US$38.01 per share in a -US$404k sale. So it's clear an insider wanted to take some cash off the table, even below the current price of US$48.81. When an insider sells below the current price, it suggests that they considered that lower price to be fair. That makes us wonder what they think of the (higher) recent valuation. While insider selling is not a positive sign, we can't be sure if it does mean insiders think the shares are fully valued, so it's only a weak sign. We note that the biggest single sale was only 18% of Steven Tucker's holding.

Over the last year, we can see that insiders have bought 7.38k shares worth US$316k. But they sold 16.14k shares for US$669k. All up, insiders sold more shares in SmartFinancial than they bought, over the last year. The chart below shows insider transactions (by companies and individuals) over the last year. If you want to know exactly who sold, for how much, and when, simply click on the graph below!

Check out our latest analysis for SmartFinancial

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Insider Ownership

For a common shareholder, it is worth checking how many shares are held by company insiders. We usually like to see fairly high levels of insider ownership. It appears that SmartFinancial insiders own 11% of the company, worth about US$94m. While this is a strong but not outstanding level of insider ownership, it's enough to indicate some alignment between management and smaller shareholders.

So What Do The SmartFinancial Insider Transactions Indicate?

Insiders sold stock recently, but they haven't been buying. And our longer term analysis of insider transactions didn't bring confidence, either. But since SmartFinancial is profitable and growing, we're not too worried by this. Insiders own shares, but we're still pretty cautious, given the history of sales. So we'd only buy after careful consideration. In addition to knowing about insider transactions going on, it's beneficial to identify the risks facing SmartFinancial. While conducting our analysis, we found that SmartFinancial has 1 warning sign and it would be unwise to ignore it.

Of course, you might find a fantastic investment by looking elsewhere. So take a peek at this free list of interesting companies.

For the purposes of this article, insiders are those individuals who report their transactions to the relevant regulatory body. We currently account for open market transactions and private dispositions of direct interests only, but not derivative transactions or indirect interests.

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