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KeyCorp Chief Information Officer Amy Brady sold $700,000 in KeyCorp shares amid last week’s selloff in what the company says was a “precleared” trade.
Brady sold 45,000 shares of KeyCorp
KEY,
on March 10 at an average price of $15.58, the company disclosed in a Tuesday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“This was a precleared trade and the timing was related to KeyCorp’s year-end compensation schedule and the vesting of performance shares awarded to her,” a KeyCorp spokesperson told MarketWatch. Brady was cleared to trade with an allowable trading window between March 8 and March 14.
Brady “timed the sale really smartly,” said Ben Silverman, the director of research at VerityData, which tracks insider purchasing. While KeyCorp shares sold off in all five sessions last week, with the sharpest one-day decline of 7% occurring March 9 after Silicon Valley Bank’s troubles came to light, Brady made her sale of 45,000 shares before the stock tumbled 27% on Monday, March 13.
But Silverman doesn’t see Brady’s sale as necessarily troublesome given that her capacity as chief information officer situates her on the operational side of KeyCorp rather than on the investment side. Brady was cleared to trade, indicating those involved in such compliance approvals determined at the time that she wasn’t in possession of material nonpublic information.
Brady’s stock sale “simply stands out because it’s an outlier” when looking at recent insider activity in bank names,” Silverman continued. He’s seen buying among insiders at about 105 companies, mainly smaller and mid-sized regional banks, with minimal selling. Purchases by executives and directors elsewhere seem to be aimed at sending messages that their shares are “oversold,” he noted.
See more: Charles Schwab CEO and other insiders scoop up nearly $7 million in stock amid selloff
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Brady netted just over 49,000 shares in February after two batches of restricted stock vested, factoring out amounts withheld to cover tax liabilities, he said. She owned about 119,000 shares following her sales last week, according to the SEC filing.
The KeyCorp spokesperson said that as part of company policies for all executives, “Amy is subject to minimum share ownership requirements equal to three times her base salary.”
