Recent market volatility is enough to make your head spin, and can cause plenty of confusion for retail investors seeking a solid market strategy. It’s tempting to look to the experts, but that raises another question: which experts are the best to follow?
Probably the best experts to follow are the corporate insiders. These are company officers, in upper management or the Board of Directors, who have both direct access to their company’s inner workings and a responsibility to their shareholders for bringing in profits. The combination makes their stock purchases a popular data point for investors seeking an expert opinion.
Investors can look to these moves, using TipRanks’ Insiders Hot Stocks tool. We’ve used that tool to do just that, find a couple of stocks whose price has dropped over the past year – and that drop has coincided with some ‘informative buy’ insider trades. Let’s take a closer look.
Luminar Technologies (LAZR)
The first stock we’re looking at, Luminar Technologies, works in the emerging autonomous vehicle sector, where it develops vision-based Lidar systems essential for self-driving cars. Lidar, or light detection and ranging, is the chief sensor technology allowing self-driving vehicles to see and sense their environment, to avoid obstacles and exploit traffic gaps. Luminar is working on advanced new Lidar systems, starting from the semiconductor chips but including sensors, transceiver/receivers, and processing electronics, to give autonomous vehicles the best perception capabilities possible.
This tech firm entered the public market in 2020 through a SPAC merger with Gores Metropoulos, in a deal that brought Luminar $590 million in cash and saw the LAZR ticker open on the NASDAQ on December 3 of that year. In the year since the SPAC combination closed, Luminar shares first spiked and then tumbled; the stock has lost 66% in the last 12 months.
Even though the stock is down, this new tech company has also been reporting rising revenues. In its most recently reported quarter, 3Q21, Luminar had $8 million at the top line, which…
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