Insider Stock Buying Reaches US$1.16m On Valley National Bancorp

Valley National Bancorp Insider Transactions Over The Last Year
In the last twelve months, the biggest single purchase by an insider was when Independent Director Jennifer Steans bought US$515k worth of shares at a price of US$10.29 per share. That means that even when the share price was higher than US$8.21 (the recent price), an insider wanted to purchase shares. Their view may have changed since then, but at least it shows they felt optimistic at the time. In our view, the price an insider pays for shares is very important. As a general rule, we feel more positive about a stock if insiders have bought shares at above current prices, because that suggests they viewed the stock as good value, even at a higher price.

Happily, we note that in the last year insiders paid US$1.2m for 111.69k shares. But they sold 6.00k shares for US$71k. In total, Valley National Bancorp insiders bought more than they sold over the last year.

Insider Ownership
Another way to test the alignment between the leaders of a company and other shareholders is to look at how many shares they own. Usually, the higher the insider ownership, the more likely it is that insiders will be incentivised to build the company for the long term. Insiders own 1.4% of Valley National Bancorp shares, worth about US$59m. While this is a strong but not outstanding level of insider ownership, it's enough to indicate some alignment between management and smaller shareholders.