Feb 13, 2022 - George Lucas
4:48 PM
Newsletter
Comparing the current price relative to MRNA's 52 week high of $497.49, we see that MRNA is currently trading 67.6 % lower than the 52 week high price.
In mid 2019, MRNA was trading around $20 per share. In the middle of 2021 it reached an all time high of almost $500 per share. This is a 25x increase in share price, which is significant. This is important to note because until the pandemic hit, Stephen had not sold any of his shares.
Here is a quick snippet of Stephen's corporate profile. He has been with Moderna for over 10 years.
Stéphane Bancel has served as Moderna's Chief Executive Officer since October 2011 and as a member of Moderna's board of directors since March 2011. Before joining the Company, Mr. Bancel served for five years as Chief Executive Officer of the French diagnostics company bioMérieux SA. From July 2000 to March 2006, he served in various roles at Eli Lilly and Company, including as Managing Director, Belgium and as Executive Director, Global Manufacturing Strategy and Supply Chain. Prior to Lilly, Mr. Bancel served as Asia-Pacific Sales and Marketing Director for bioMérieux.
Over the last 5 years Stephen has not purchased any shares of Moderna. Typically, we see CEOs and members of the executive leadership team purchase shares of their own company if they believe it is a strong investment.
The chart below shows that in the last 2 year, Stephen sold shares on almost a weekly basis.
If we look at the 5-year chart and performance of MRNA we see that the pandemic has been very profitable for Moderna.
Source: Utradea MRNA Stock
One of the greatest investors of all time, Peter Lynch, was noted as saying that "insiders might sell their shares for any number of reasons, but they buy them for only one: they think the price will rise.”
I think this quote is pretty telling. The executive team doesn't thin MRNA will reach these highs again, since a majority of their revenue came from COVID-19 vaccines.
On February 8, 2022 Stephen deleted his Twitter account. Here is a link to his deleted account
There are several reasons why someone would delete their account. We've seen in the past people get called put for incorrect or inappropriate tweets. This could be one of the reasons. I think the other main reasons is that Tweets can be used in a court of law, and if Stephen is facing upcoming litigation he might have been instructed by his legal counsel to delete his account and historical tweets.
This interesting tweet was shared on February 4, 2022
Former Blackrock fund manager Edward Dowd, grew his fund to $14B by anticipating the next big news, believes Big Insurance will be the catalyst that causes the wheels to come off. Major life insurance firms are reporting multi-sigma increases in non-Covid-related death claims. Link to original tweet and video
Moderna CEO warns people may need fourth Covid shot as efficacy of boosters likely to decline over time (source)
I think it's self evident. There are two main reasons why Stephen deleted his twitter account and has been selling his shares over the past year.
We won't know for sure why he deleted his account, and a lot of it is speculation. The selling of shares over the last 2 years makes sense, and we've seen several other CEOs and executives sell their shares when their share prices hit all-time highs. I think we will start to new additional news and reports about Moderna over the coming weeks which will provide a more concrete reason to why Stephen deleted his Twitter account.