Insiders of Barrick Gold Corp. (ABX, Financial) are scooping up shares of their own company.
John Thornton, the miner's executive chairman, acquired 306,000 shares. Following the buy transaction, Thornton holds approximately 2.721 million ordinary shares of his own company, according to mining.com.
Also, two other independent directors of Barrick Gold Corp have increased their beneficiary ownership. Rob Prichard purchased 10,000 shares and Graham Clow bought 7,500 shares.
On Wednesday, Barrick Gold Corp. closed at $12.32 per share, a 1.15% jump from the previous trading day. The stock opened at $12.24 per share and intraday the market reported a highest price of $12.19 and a lowest price of $12.35 per share.
An average volume of 10,486,879 shares were traded versus an average volume of 12,809,346 over the last three months of trading.
Insider purchases may be an indication that Barrick Gold Corp., which lost 19% year-to-date (see the chart powered by GuruFocus.com), should be on your buying list.
Over the same span of time, the stock of the biggest producer of gold in the world has underperformed the Van Eck Vectors Gold Miners (ETF) by 10%.
The gold stock is trading a few dollars above the 52-week low price of $11.07 and at 39.5% discount of the 52-weeks high at $20.36 per share.
Barrick Gold Corp has a market capitalization of $14.36 billion, a price-book (P/B) ratio of 1.56 times versus an industry median of 2.06 times, and an EV-to-Ebitda ratio of 4.01 times versus an industry median of 9.90 times.
The average target price is $16.35 per share. Wall Street assigns a 2.8 recommendation rating of a 1.0 (strong buy) to 5.0 (sell) range.
(Disclosure: I have no positions in any security mentioned in this article.)
