“You can’t kill optimism”

Frankfurt If Germany’s executive boards and supervisory boards have their way, nothing stands in the way of a year-end rally on the stock exchanges. In October, too, they bought more shares in their own companies than they sold. Olaf Stotz, professor at the Frankfurt School private university, sums it up like this: “The optimism among the insiders cannot be killed.”

The behavior of insiders is unusual in some ways because the theory is that they are acting counter-cyclically. In other words, you buy shares when prices are falling and the shares are valued cheaply. Conversely, they are more likely to take profits with higher prices and high valuations.

Countercyclical among the largest purchases were those at Delivery Hero and Fielmann. The share of the online food supplier and that of the optician chain have fallen significantly. At Delivery Hero, boss and founder Niklas Östberg bought shares for a total of almost nine million euros. Supervisory Board Mark Binz invested 556,000 euros in Fielmann shares.