The law states that trading is not permitted under the law in...

The law states that trading is not permitted under the law in any circumstances if the person trading knows unannounced, price-sensitive information.

Considering this, my read is that since that both Tom Cregan and Liddy sold shares, then they would potentially be in hot water if there is any price sensitive news in the near future that is negative and drives the SP down. This would look very suspicious and is the stuff that insider trading cases and class actions are made of. You only need to have a look at IMF Bentham's string of recent class action funding cases in their fund portfolio to see how common these class actions are (for example Slater & Gordon, Spotless, Shine etc etc).

It stands to reason then that the directors who sold know nothing price sensitive that might have a negative impact on the share price. This is cold comfort considering the market has in this case (and almost always does) reacted negatively to directors selling shares and resulted in a drop in the share price regardless.


You'll also notice that David Liddy did not sell any of his personal shares. Only those in his SMSF. David Liddy is not a young guy and would be thinking seriously about his retirement and protecting his super. If I try to think about why he might have sold SMSF held shares in his situation, by applying Occam's razor I come up with the answer that he is simply derisking his super portfolio by balancing it and moving money to safer asset classes. This is pretty much exactly what every one of us will do at that age when we are getting older and closer to retirement.

So irrespective of what the market's short term reaction is, if I remove emotion from the equation and refer back to their forecasts for FY18 I can't really see that any long term issues have suddenly just arisen. It is probably just going to be a quiet December on the news front, then business as usual.