Stock Price Movement Question

[grumpy]

Among my dividend paying stocks I have long owned American States Water (AWR). On Wednesday the overall market was up but the shares of AWR were down nearly 8%. I have been unable to find any news on-line to explain this drastic drop in price. Does this sound like insider trading based on information not yet available to the investing public? Is there any way to find out if there were a few or a single big seller of the shares on that day?

I'm just curious. I plan to continue to hold these shares.

 

[dex]

AWR Historical Prices | American States Water Company C Stock - Yahoo! Finance

Big trading on the 2nd

 

[GusLevy]

To the OP, if you have owned AWR for a long time I would have suspected that you would be jaded to the short term volatility by now. I own CWT currently and have owned AQUA, WTR, etc in the past. Water utilities really trade more like a quasi-amalgam of a municipal and corporate preferred stock with respect to their beta relative to the broad stock mkts due to their regulated business nature. You, me and the rest of the water utility owners hold these stocks for their yield and stable long term share price with the call option on something nice to happen on the corporate or commodity front.

Anyway, my guess is that AWR made that move on Wed since the mkt went long growth stocks that day and sold all yield vehicles to pay for it.

 

[Nords]

Among my dividend paying stocks I have long owned American States Water (AWR). On Wednesday the overall market was up but the shares of AWR were down nearly 8%. I have been unable to find any news on-line to explain this drastic drop in price. Does this sound like insider trading based on information not yet available to the investing public? Is there any way to find out if there were a few or a single big seller of the shares on that day?
I'm just curious. I plan to continue to hold these shares.

Did they issue a honkin' big dividend that day or put out a press release about future dividends?

I use "Google Alerts" to get daily e-mails for the funds & stocks I'm tracking. Each e-mail has a dozen links to that day's news, and most of them are the same news items from different websites. It takes about 60 seconds to scan one e-mail's links and figure out what's happening.

What really freaks me out is to post a comment on this forum on a stock like Berkshire Hathaway, and then the next morning get a Google Alert with a link to the post I'd put up.

Some corporate websites offer an e-mail subscription to their SEC filings. You get an e-mail with a link to every 8K, 10Q, press release, or other filings. Again it usually takes about 30 seconds to read the first couple paragraphs to figure out your level of interest/concern.

 

[jayc]

I see the CEO had an interview on 12/2 but did not wade through the entire transcript. Maybe he mentioned something negative about future earnings or events. I did notice this company depends on continued acquisitions. Maybe with commodity prices rising this may slow it down.

 

[JPatrick]

This is a fairly low volume stock that increased in volume by about 5 times on the day in question. Certainly could have been a single large holder dumping.
You may want to check out PHO which is a water ETF. You will note it has a pattern shape about like AWR less the recent big dip.