THERE is only one thing better than one director buying shares in his own company and that's two directors doing a bit of buying.
In the case of QBE Insurance Group make that three: the man who made the insurer, Frank O'Halloran, non-executive director Duncan Boyle and former Macquarie Bank heavy John Green, who joined the QBE board this month.
All three bought scrip following the group's results. Before they were released, QBE shares were fetching $23 but the market didn't fancy the higher-earnings result and a higher dividend, and marked the scrip down by a couple of dollars.
Mr O'Halloran, a relatively rare on-market buyer of the stock, shelled out a bit more than $500,000, paying $20.33 a share, Duncan Boyle paid $21.10 and John Green paid $20.44. All up they spent slightly more than $900,000.
And the good news is, at this very early stage, they are ahead of the game as the shares closed yesterday at $21.15 after selling up to $21.37.
Meanwhile, once again, more money was extracted from the market by directors doing some selling, about $30 million, compared with about $5 million on the buying side.
Heading the sellers was master retailer Richard Uechtritz, who continues to whittle away at his handy stake in JB Hi-Fi. This time nearly $10 million went into the Uechtritz coffers with the disposal of shares at $19.74 apiece. That compared with $18.22 a share for an identical line of stock six months ago.
All up, he has sold about $62 million worth of shares since he put JB Hi-Fi on its growth trajectory.
Elsewhere, David Crawford emerged as a supporter of Foster's Group. The market did not embrace the company's latest results and there is now a good deal of bearish comment surrounding the stock. The company's share price has been locked in a trading channel of between $5.30 and $5.70 for the last half-year while takeover rumours come and go.
Mr Crawford was not a big buyer. He extracted some change from his fob pocket and paid $5.39 a share.
While Donald Argus parted with nearly $500,000 a few weeks back, two BHP management heavies extracted about $4.7 million. Karen Wood said she sold to pay tax and other financial obligations, while Marcus Randolph sold to fund financial obligations.
In small-cap land, Christopher Newman, a Webjet director, resumed selling shares, as did Ken Fowlie over at Slater&Gordon.
Gary McGrechan, one of the founding directors of LogiCamms, sold about 6 per cent of the company to institutions and ''high-net-worth individuals''.
Floated two years ago at a buck a share, he got 96¢ each for 3.5 million shares.
