Shares of functional materials developer Meta Materials (US:MMAT) rallied 30.1% in trading on Monday after investors became aware that the group’s Chairman, John Harding, doubled down on his position in the stock.

The transaction was initially spotted on Fintel’s latest insider trading tracker page, later on Wednesday evening.

MMAT is quite popular with the retail investing group and has risen 35 ranks to 57th spot on the retail ownership leaderboard. You can access retail trade data for free by linking your portfolio with the community via this link.

The form 4 was filed with the SEC on Friday evening and disclosed the purchase of 126,000 shares in the Chairman’s Harding Partners Lp entity as per the award agreement. The transaction occurred last Wednesday with a total value of ~$220,000.

The latest acquisition grew Harding’s total position in the company by 231% to around 222,000 shares.

Harding was appointed as Chair of the board back on the 16th of August and replaced Ram Ramkumar who moved into a strategic advisory role.

This latest rally on Monday has pushed MMAT’s total stock gain above 200% since bottoming out in early October. Prior to bottoming out, MMAT’s stock was down almost 80% for 2022 and now only has losses of -24% for 2022.

Momentum returned in the stock shortly after the company announced that it had received purchase orders worth $4.3 million at the end of September. The purchase order was from a G10 central bank customer that agreed to a maximum contract value of $41.5 million over a five year period.

To put the figure into context, in early November Meta Materials generated $2.45 million in revenue, growing from the $572K generated in the prior year quarter.

Losses from operations grew to -$22.18 million from -$11.59 million in 2021, primarily driven by growth in R&D expenses and general admin costs which expanded significantly.

At the bottom line, the net loss after including FX headwinds came in at -$24.48 million, widening from -$11.43 million in the prior year.

MMAT ended the quarter with $30.6 million in cash on the balance sheet but announced that it had filed a mixed securities S3 shelf filing worth $250 million.

Analyst MacMurray Whale from Cormark Securities reduced his target price from $5 to $3.50 following the Q3 result as revenue came in below the firm’s $3.4 million forecast.

The lower target price revisions were driven by a slower than expected ramp up in revenues and margins with a higher level of cash burn. Whale did recognize that it is difficult to model the rapid changes occurring in the EV space.

The stock has also been supported by a recent MOU (memorandum of understanding) that was signed with DuPont Teijin Films and Mitsubishi Electric Europe with plans for the organisations to use MMAT’s PLASMAfusion to help create a manufacturing system that will reduce the reliance on copper in battery production.

The MoU brings the company one step closer towards its goal of industry adoption for its products.

Fintel’s fund sentiment score of 5.13 remains bearish on MMAT’s institutional buying activity. This score ranks MMAT in the bottom 1% of 35,654 companies. This partially describes the weakening share price over the majority of 2022.

Despite the weak fund sentiment score, MMAT still has 140 institutions on the register that own 36.7 million shares. Some of the largest institutions include: Millennium Management, Geode Capital Management, Goldman Sachs Group Inc, and Mitsubishi UFJ Kokusai Asset Management Co.

 

This article originally appeared on Fintel

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