Big Insider Buys At American Express, General Electric And Kinder Morgan

• Some insiders continue to take advantage of the ongoing market volatility to snap up bargains.
• Notable insider purchases this past week came from the financial, industrial and energy sectors.
• Strong insider buying is often considered a positive sign for investors, particularly during volatile times.

A dreadful January for the markets is behind us now, and investors are no doubt glad to see it go. Well, most of them. Some insiders continue to take advantage of the ongoing volatility to bolster their positions. It may be a good sign that they are not panicking, particularly in downtrodden sectors like energy and finance.

Conventional wisdom says that insiders and 10 percent owners really only buy shares of a company for one reason – they believe the stock price will rise and they want to profit from it.

American Express

One director has recently acquired a block of American Express Company AXP shares at $55.51 apiece. Those more than 18,000 shares cost that director a little over $1 million. This was after the company recently reported mixed fourth-quarter results, which led to at least one downgrade.

The market cap of this payment and travel services provider is about $10.8 billion, and it has a dividend yield near 2.2 percent. The share price is down more than 21 percent since the beginning of the year to $54.69, making it one of the worst performers among the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Related Link: Following 'Opportunistic Insiders' For +1% Monthly Alpha; Does It Work?

General Electric

A senior vice president scooped up more than $1.8 million worth of General Electric Company GE shares last week. That was more than 65,000 of them at $28.04 per share. General Electric also reported mixed fourth-quarter results in January.

Investors enjoy a dividend yield of about 3.1 percent, and the market cap of this conglomerate is near $270 billion. The share price is down about 8 percent year to date to close most recently at $28.64. Note that the Dow is less than 6 percent lower in that time.

Kinder Morgan

A director added 180,000 shares to his stake in this energy and energy infrastructure giant last week. At $14.20 per share, the total for the purchase came to more than $2.5 million. This sector bellwether saw an analyst upgrade in the wake of its mixed results.

Kinder Morgan Inc KMI has a $33.9 million market cap, as well as a dividend yield near 3.0 percent. The stock closed Monday at $15.19 a share, so it looks like a well-timed buy. Year to date, shares are in positive territory, despite being down almost 20 percent at one point.

At the time of this writing, the author had no position in the mentioned equities.