Patience is a profitable virtue, at least for a pair of company insiders at Stryker Corp. (NYSE:SYK)
With only two weeks remaining until the options expired for good April 13, Curtis Hall, general counsel and a vice president at the Kalamazoo, Mich.-based device maker, decided the time was right to pay $16.21 apiece to acquire 60,000 shares of company stock. After spending $434,000 and change to purchase the stock, Hall promptly sold off more than half of the newly acquired shares for $57.18, Stryker’s mid-morning price in March 29 trading.
Hall’s net gain: $926,500, although if he’d waited until later that day, when Stryker shares edged as high as $57.62, he could have pocketed an extra $14,600. Hall still owns more than 104,000 shares worth just under $6 million, including the 26,787 shares left over from his March 30 trading.
Ronda Stryker, a company director and granddaughter of Stryker founder Homer Stryker, also stepped up Monday to exercise 20,000 options at $16.21 a share, set to expire next month.
The $324,000 purchase lifted her individual stake to 132,000 shares, worth about $7.5 million, although she also owns another 33.9 million shares of company stock through a pair of trusts.
