The capital markets are not a simple game of follow the leader. Every single investor who has ever lived or will ever live always wants to find that one indicator that will predict with certainty where stocks are headed. Many use insider signals. But certainty does not exist. Insider selling is only predictive of outcomes that are extremely binary, or otherwise as some part of a pump and dump scheme. For example, if the FDA is about to approve or reject a drug and you see a bunch of insider selling the day or week before the bureaucrats meet, you can assume that someone has insider information that is not being released to the public. In that case, you better sell.

Or if you fell for one of those spam emails about how some unknown company with a market cap of $5 million is going to be the next Apple in 3 months time and somehow accomplish this without any employees, and you see a form 4 filing from the CEO selling all his shares to the poor lemmings who were taken in by spam, it’s a good indication to get out. But when it comes to established and highly liquid companies like 888 that are not either penny stocks or extremely binary biotechs dependent on the opinion of a single bureaucrat at the FDA, insider selling does not mean a stock has reached a high. All it means is that the seller would rather do something else with his money.

News is abuzz about how Shay Ben-Yitzhak, one of the founders of 888, lowered his stake to below 2.6% of the company from 10.9%. What many people don’t know about Shay Ben-Yitzhak is, well, almost everything. The man is a shadow, avoids media attention, does not revel in fame, does not conduct interviews, does not even have his own Wikipedia page. The man co-founded one of the most successful companies in Israel without any serious government “protexia” as they say in Israel for sly connections with the corridors of power, he’s one of Israel’s biggest tycoons, and he’s not even on Wikipedia.

Let me clarify for linguistic purposes that I live in Israel, I am fluent in Hebrew, and I checked for any Hebrew Wikipedia page or any other Hebrew biography for שי בן יצחק as well and did not find anything substantive, so it’s not just a language gap. The first result on Google from an Israeli IP address for the Hebrew name is an article from 2005. Talk about one heck of a microscopic internet footprint. All that is known is that he’s a computer guy and he was in charge of writing the software that powered 888 at the very beginning in the late 90’s.