Insider Trades: Directors bought and sold shares in these 24 ASX companies last week

Welcome back to the Insider Trades Series – A weekly summary of on-market ASX director transactions valued at more than $10,000. The trades have all taken place between 12 and 18 April 2024. Directors have up to 5 business days to notify the ASX of their trades.

WiseTech: seasonal selldown

Wisetech's CEO and founder Richard White has sold approximately $591.7 million worth of share since 2020. He has the tendency to sell during the first and fourth quarter of every calendar year. Despite offloading what seems like a large portion of his ownership, he still owns approximately 39.7% of the company. The bottom line – big numbers but nothing much to see here!

Vita Life Sciences: insiders sell into strength

Vita Life Sciences is an over-the-counter (OTC) medicines developer and distributor with various brand names throughout Australia, South East Asia and China. The stock rallied 17% to near-two year highs following the release of its full-year results on 26 February. Some of the key highlights from the result include:

• Sales up 10.9% to a record $74.1 million

• "Strong revenue growth from Australia, Malaysia and with increased exports into China."

• Cash balance of $24.6 million with no debt (current market cap of $130 million)

• Fully franked dividend of 9 cents per share for 2023, up from 6 cents in 2022

The trades from Managing Director Andrew O'Keefe and Non-Executive Chairman Henry Townsing mark the first insider sell since February 2022.

After selling 920,000 shares ($1.93m), Mr O'Keefe beneficially owns 590,000 shares in the company.

Origin Energy: CEO selling at 5-year highs

Origin Energy experienced a 17% drawdown in the December quarter after rejecting a $10.6 billion Brookfield-led consortium bid. But the stock managed to recoup the drawdown pretty quickly, now up around 26% from December lows and trading at levels not seen since September 2018. The company's half-year results (announced 15 Feb) reported a 17-fold jump in underlying profit as well as a bigger-than-expected dividend.

Origin Chief Executive Frank Calabria has sold a little over $2 million worth of shares, marking his first on-market sell since November 2019 (or right before the pandemic hit). He beneficially owns 1.4 million shares in the company.

Big hitters of interest

Devex Resources is a uranium explorer operating the Nabarlek Project in the Northern Territory and Murphy West Project in the Northern Territory. Executive Director Timothy Goyder (who is also the Non-Executive Chairman of Liontown Resources) has purchased more than $1 million worth of shares in April. The company says a 2024 exploration field season set to commence in mid-May with an extensive Reverse Circulation (RC) and diamond drilling (DD) programme.

Prospect Resources shares more than doubled in early April after the company announced the acquisition of an advanced copper-cobalt project in Zambia. "Prospect has successfully unlocked this disputed and potentially world-class copper-cobalt asset by securing binding agreements with the parties involved and releasing its latent prospectivity," the company said in a statement. It's interesting to see Managing Director Samuel Hosack purchase $503,498 worth of shares after the price spike.

The remaining insider trades