There are bad trades.
And then there is selling something for $28.6 million and discovering you've lost another $47.6 million along the way.
That's what just happened to Alex Reynolds.
Reynolds sold 587,421 shares of Harvest Foods for $28,560,409, recording a loss of $47,622,220.
We'll save you the calculator.
That means Reynolds appears to have had roughly $76.2 million invested in the position before taking the loss.
That's enough to get our attention all by itself.
Then, 25 minutes later, things got more interesting.
Kyle Fitzgerald bought 67,042 shares of Harvest Foods for $3,258,241.
One investor had just exited Harvest Foods with a loss larger than the entire value of many companies.
Another looked at essentially the same moment and put more than $3.2 million in.
We don't know Fitzgerald's reasoning, and we don't know what finally convinced Reynolds to sell. The transaction log gives us the trades, not the investment memos.
So it would be a mistake to declare that one of them is right.
But together, the transactions give us something better to watch.
Reynolds' sale works out to roughly $48.62 per share.
Fitzgerald's purchase?
About $48.60 per share.
In other words, these weren't investors reaching different conclusions months apart at dramatically different valuations.
They were looking at Harvest Foods at practically the same price and the same moment.
One said: I'm done.
The other said: I'll take $3.3 million worth.
That's what makes markets interesting. Every sale requires someone willing to stand on the other side of it—and occasionally the disagreement is enormous.
For Reynolds, the story has already been written:
-$47,622,220.
For Fitzgerald, it has just begun.
We'll be watching Harvest Foods to find out which side of this trade ages better.
That's the fine print.