As a household name, Disney (NYSE: DIS) is a cultural powerhouse. However, even companies of such size and importance are not immune to wider factors.
Notably, in September of 2023, DIS shares were trading at a 10-year low.
Over the course of 2024, Disney stock has continued to experience significant volatility — at times, reaching prices as high as $122.82, and at others, as low as $85.60.
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There’s no big secret at play — the explanation is quite simple. A lot of Disney’s revenue comes from two sources where conditions haven’t exactly been favorable — the box office and streaming.
Well, at least that used to be the case — the company’s Q4 and full-year 2024 earnings call held on November 14 strongly suggests otherwise. Earnings per share (EPS) and revenue both came in above analyst expectations — and the two once-sore spots, streaming and movies, now appear to be among the best-performing segments of the House of Mouse.
At press time, DIS stock was trading at $114.76 — exactly one month ago, a day before the aforementioned earnings call, the price of a single DIS share was $102.72. This 11.66% surge has supplemented year-to-date (YTD) returns up to 26.51%.
One slight caveat should be mentioned — on November 20, the company’s Executive Vice President, Controllership, Finance and Tax, Brent Woodford, sold 5,000 shares worth roughly $568,101 at the time of the transaction. On December 11, he completed another sale, according to data retrieved by Finbold’s insider trading radar from an SEC filing made public on December 12.
Insider dumps $917,920 in Disney stock
Woodford executed two sell transactions on December 11 — each encompassed 4,000 Disney shares.
Woodford sold 8,000 Disney shares in two transactions. The first batch was sold at an average price of $114.49, while the second fetched a slightly higher average of $114.99. Together, these sales amounted to $917,920.
Following the sale, the executive vice president still holds 44,055 DIS shares directly.
Before the sale, the Disney insider exercised stock options with a December 18 expiry date to acquire 8,000 shares at a price of $92.235 apiece. This transaction set Woodford back quite a tidy sum — $737,880, to be exact. Once all is said and done, the executive profited approximately $180,040.
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This signal is triggered upon the reporting of the trade to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Interestingly enough, this sale is atypical in one particular regard — it wasn’t prescheduled and done according to a 10b5-1 plan. The same holds true for Woodford’s earlier sale in November. While not necessarily indicative of any change in underlying growth prospects, this fact would suggest that the insider saw the current Disney stock price as a fair point at which to lock in profits.
Investors shouldn’t interpret this sale as a bearish signal — Disney stock has a lot of momentum going into 2025 and is still trading quite a ways away from its all-time high price of almost $200 reached in March of 2021. Should the current trend of outperforming analyst expectations hold, the value of DIS shares could easily see a significant increase in the coming year.
Featured image via Shutterstock
