Shares of eHealth (US:EHTH), an online marketplace for health insurance, rose 10.75% on Monday. This comes after a Form 4 filed with the SEC revealed that the group’s CEO, Francis Soistmann, had bought a significant amount of shares on the market last week in the third consecutive trading window. is. Quarterly results. The deal was first spotted on his CEO buying page on Fintel’s latest over the weekend.
The filing revealed that Soistman purchased 80,000 shares on Tuesday, November 22nd at an average price of $3.08 per share. With a total transaction value of just under $250,000, Soistman’s total shares increased to 428,515.
The deal comes at a time when eHealth’s stock continues to bounce back from pandemic highs that saw the stock trade above $100. The stock is now below pre-pandemic levels and remains down -87% since early 2022.
This latest market purchase was Soistman’s first acquisition of shares since it purchased shares last November 2021.
EHTH’s CEO wasn’t the only insider to trade during this period. Director Dale Wolf took advantage of the trading window on November 17 to sell 5,000 of his shares at an average price of $3.24. The total transaction value was approximately $16,000.
Fintel’s insider sentiment score is 63.67, and EHTH ranks among the top 6% of companies with the highest levels of insider buying when compared to 14,693 other stocks.
The weight of the CEO buy pushed the stock up the leaderboard this month.
The chart on the right shows planned and unplanned purchases and sales by EHTH corporate insiders.
EHTH’s fund sentiment score of 15.43 is much weaker, ranking in the bottom 5% of the 36,534 companies screened. This score explains the significant decline in stock prices going into 2022 as fund managers reduce their exposure to the company. Despite the low score, EHTH has a total of 335 institutions registered with his 22.95 million free float.
In early November, eHealth soared 50% to $4 by November 9 following a better-than-expected third quarter result.
eHealth revenue fell 16.5% for the year to $53.4 million, but 10% above consensus expectations of about $48.5 million. Medicare sales were flat for the year, while the individual, family, and small business segments were down 53% for the year to $8.2 million.
Potential losses, as measured by adjusted EBITDA, narrowed from -$55.2 million to -$33.1 million, beating analyst estimates of -$40 million. Net loss narrowed to -$47 million from -$60 million in Q3 2021.
Soistman excited investors with bullish comments “We are pleased with our performance in the first eight weeks of our annual enrollment period, which indicates a significant increase in agent productivity compared to last year.”
eHealth provided full-year guidance for investors expecting annual revenues of $375 million to $395 million and potential losses of $45 million to $75 million. Guidance was within market expectations.
Craig-Hallum Capital analyst George Sutton is encouraged by the meaningful changes made by the new management, but points out that more work is needed. Sutton believes a strong performance next quarter could mark an inflection point for the business, but remains cautious about the ‘hold’ rating and his $6 target price.
EHTH has a consensus “hold” recommendation, with an average target price of $7.20 in the market.
This story was originally published in Fintel.
The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
