Aggregate Insider Trading and the Predictability of Market Returns: Contrarian Strategy or Managerial Timing?

Abstract

We decompose realized market returns into expected return, unexpected cash flow news and unexpected discount rate news to test the relation between aggregate market returns and aggregate insider trading. Our motivation is to distinguish whether the observed relation between market returns and insider trading is due to contrarian strategy or managerial timing. We find that (1) the predictive ability of aggregate insider trading is much stronger than what was reported in earlier studies (2) aggregate insider trading is strongly related to unexpected cash-flow news and (3) market expectations do not cause insider trading, contrary to what others have documented. These results strongly suggest that the predictive ability of aggregate insider trading is because of managerial timing rather than contrarian strategy. These results hold even after we control for information uncertainty by using firm size as proxies.

Keywords: Insider trading, Contrarian strategy,Predictability of market returns,Managerial timing

JEL Classification: G14