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Should Insider Selling at This Company Be Concerning?

By Motley Fool Staff – Dec 23, 2021 at 1:30AM

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Some sales may be for tax purposes.

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 -0.35%) management.

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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.

Auri Hughes owns Xpel Inc. Nick Sciple owns Xpel Inc. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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