In this segment of "Industry Focus" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on Dec. 2, Fool analysts Auri Hughes and Nick Sciple discuss some of the stock sales by XPEL (XPEL -4.42%) management.
Auri Hughes: Let me see the extent of the insider selling. It's like 6%. Ryan Pape is the one I would pay attention to, who is the CEO. It's a fairly small amount and he's made a tremendous amount of money, so he's probably just tapering. He's probably just taking in some shares but he didn't sell his whole position or anything like that. I think he still owns a fairly good amount.
Nick Sciple: He owns 5% of the company or so.
Hughes: Yeah.
Sciple: I'm pulling it up here. It looks like most of the recent selling is by a former director.
Hughes: Kevin Richard Crumly.
Sciple: Yeah, moving to a new position though, the other thing is too, it's been public for two years so we're probably getting to the point where some lock-ups have ended, I think obviously a year ago.
Then the other thing is, and we've seen this across the board which makes me just a little more dubious on selling, it's just what we see with these tax changes. You saw Satya Nadella do a big sale related to later tax, so now even more so than we would see normally, there's likely to be some estate planning for very high net-worth folks.
So, it doesn't surprise me to see elevated insider selling. Again for me, to Auri's point, you're not seeing meaningful selling from the folks that I think are important. Again, I think the track record, the runway for growth is still very strong, so if they want to sell to me, I'm happy.
Hughes: Yeah. I think they're still executing, so it's not like it's not showing up in the numbers they're still growing, they're still making accretive acquisitions. I think it's still attractive and Richard Crumly still owns like 11% of the company, worth $218 million, so I might do the same thing [laughs] if I was sitting on that.
