Directors' Dealings in Germany (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Banking, Stock Exchanges, Insurance, Accounting, grade: 12,0, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, language: English, abstract: According to Stützel (1960), insider transactions are comparable with roulette, where corporate insiders - in contrast with regular players - have the privilege to place their chips after the ball begins to rest. In other words, certainly, the outcome of the game is well known to corporate insiders. Apart from that, focusing on capital market transactions, are corporate insiders turned out to be winners?

Due to their closeness to the business, it is said that corporate insiders possess firm-specific, non-public, and value-relevant information. Various international empirical findings support that they are able to exploit their information advantage towards market participants, so-called outsiders. Additionally, corporate insiders represent anti-cyclical abilities and they are also capable to realize price discrepancies deviating from the firm's intrinsic value.

Is there an opportunity for market participants to benefit as well? Because of legal leeway and a lag in technical transmission, typically, outsiders are informed later about transactions in own company stocks by insiders. However, referring to existing literature, predominantly, they also benefit by imitating transactions after public announcement as long as transaction costs are ignored. Thus, capital market efficiency is violated.

Of course, this link is recognized. For instance, in 2006, in cooperation with the FIFAM Research Institute for Asset Management, Handelsblatt, and the Technical University of Aachen, the Commerzbank published an insider trend barometer displaying the ratio from purchases to sales every two weeks (Handelsblatt, 2016). Furthermore, the Commerzbank issued a certificate containing companies of the DAX30 associated with directors' dealings (Commerzbank, 2006).

In comparison with established nations like the USA or the UK, Germany looks back on a brief history regulating insider trading; therefore, research activities are manageable. While one strand of literature concentrates on performance effects for insiders, the other strand analyzes performance effects for outsiders.
This thesis examines directors' dealings in two ways.