Good morning! Very little news today, which is handy as my mouse hand has turned into something resembling a claw, so a 2-day rest from using the computer is badly needed!
Director buying & selling of shares is not something I mention very often here. Broadly speaking I tend to ignore small Director buying & selling. Small, orchestrated buying of shares by several Directors at the same time is actually a bearish sign in my opinion - as it is usually little more than a cynical attempt to prop up a falling share price.
The Director transactions I really focus on are large ones - regulars will remember that I was bearish on Cupid (LON:CUP) when it started to fall heavily, one of the reasons being the huge Directors selling of shares, which was an obvious warning sign that all was not well. On the other hand, a Director selling a medium number of shares, but retaining the majority of their holding, is usually acceptable, providing there is up-to-date evidence of positive trading. However, it is a warning sign, being a reminder that the valuation might be getting high, and/or that there might be trading headwinds approaching.
The flipside of this is that when I see big Director buying, I really sit up and take notice. That's one of the biggest bull signals you can get. What is big? Well, certainly into £6-figures is a Director sending out a serious buy signal. That has just happened at a share where I hold, PuriCore (LON:PURI). A Non-Exec there, Daniel Hegglin, has just bought a million shares at 45p, so a £450k vote of confidence. That takes his holding up to 4.9m shares, 9.79% of the company, so he is clearly a wealthy man, and wealthy people are usually pretty shrewd, so I am encouraged by this signal, and might follow suit and top up my position.
We're looking at a fairly strong start, with the FTSE 100 Futures up 28 points at 6,758. How long can this carry on, is the question on everyone's lips. The consensus seems to be that for as long as near-zero interest rates continue, then shares remain an attractive asset class. It's very hard to find value in smaller caps now, although…
Alan - regarding Puricore's deeply negative 'bankruptcy risk' reading. If you click the popup on the Altman Z Score you do see the factors that make the greatest contribution to the score. The big negative contributor to the negative reading is the fact that Retained Earnings are so deeply in the red. -£166m of retained earnings (losses). There's a lot of other paid in equity, but still the company's book equity was still in the red at the last annual set of accounts (though it has moved positive on a trailing 12 month basis). 
