JUST when you thought things couldn’t get any worse for the dot-com crowd . . . things got worse.
Actually, things got better — which made things worse.
Here’s why. Insiders at several dot-coms and Internet-related companies who had held on to their shares through the company’s ups and downs — mostly downs — finally gave up and sold toward the end of last year.
But 2001 has brought a renewed interest in certain technology stocks, and their prices have risen in the last four weeks.
For example, take the insiders at Mercator Software. According to Insider Trader, a regular feature on the Edgar Online site, two Mercator insiders sold 208,000 shares for $840,520 — for an average price of $4.04 per share. The insiders sold at the moment when the shares were 97 percent below their peak.
One of the Mercator insiders was Constance Galley, who was then the president of the firm.
But alas for her — the company has since revamped its board of directors and installed a new chief executive and president. And the stock has rallied. That means the buyers of those Mercator shares have enjoyed a gain of more than 130 percent in just three months.
“It’s typically a very bearish sign when insiders sell their stock when it’s well off of its highs,” said Jonathan Moreland, director of research for Insider Trader. “Obviously, some of these insiders weren’t smart enough to see that their stocks had bottomed in the short term.”