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Strategies & Market Trends : Bosco & Crossy's stock picks,talk area -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: allevett who wrote (13626)	10/22/2005 10:57:06 PM
From: CusterInvestor	Respond to of 37387

allevett, I have enjoyed your postings from a wide variety of energy sources, thank you. Occasional insider selling means little to me, but to ignore it completely is not wise. Concerted selling by several insiders is extremely relevant to me. It can indicate management's belief of future prospects. Most recently you only need to look at Senator Frist, family and insiders at HCA. It could simply represent a window that only is open for a short time, or piggy-backing the registration as seemed to occur with ALY. Being given a choice between two comparable companies, one of which has a recent history of insider selling, which would you chose? The short-coming of my question is that I readily admit I don't have a comparable company yet. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has maintained for years that his stock holdings in the nation's largest for-profit hospital chain posed no conflict of interest for a policymaker deeply involved in health care matters. He even eceived two rulings in the 1990s from the Senate ethics committee that blessed the holding of the stock in blind trusts. So when Frist decided in June to dump all the stock, and later cited as the reason his desire to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, eyebrows went up among ethics experts and congressional watchdogs. Why did he do it at that time? Precisely a month later, after the stock was sold, its price tumbled 9 percent when executives in the company -- HCA Inc., which was founded by Frist's father and on whose board Frist's brother serves -- disclosed that hospital admissions of insured patients were lower than expected, depressing profits in the second quarter. By R. Jeffrey Smith and Jeffrey H. Birnbaum Washington Post Staff Writers Thursday, September 22, 2005; Page A10