COO Bets Big as Chairman Buys $51M in Stock

Uber President and COO Andrew Gordon MacDonald filed disclosures on 8 September showing he spent over $5.3M buying shares in two tranches on 4 September. The larger purchase totalled $4.1M for 54,325 shares. The smaller added another $1.2M for 15,675 shares. The trades were open-market, non-derivative buys, which makes them a stronger signal of conviction than routine compensation grants.

Uber's short interest sits at just 2.4% of free float, suggesting short sellers are not betting heavily against the stock. The COO's decision to put personal capital to work is an unusual vote of confidence at the current price level.

The biggest insider story of the period belongs overseas. Shenzhou International Group Chairman Ma Jianrong filed a cluster of purchases worth a combined $51.4M across five trading days in early September. Each filing showed open-market Hong Kong Stock Exchange purchases, the largest single tranche worth $25.8M on 1 September.

Turkish holding firm Katilimevim also saw its Executive Chairman Serdar Turhan disclose purchases of nearly $47.4M over four days, representing one of the largest single-executive buying runs in the data for the period.

These patterns of executive chairs putting large sums into their own companies within days of each other represent some of the freshest and highest-conviction insider signals in the most recent available filing data.