On Friday afternoon, a form 4 filed with the SEC revealed that Hycroft Mining’s (US:HYMC) largest shareholder Mudrick Capital had sold a large portion of stock in several trades on the market during the week. The transaction was spotted over the weekend on Fintel’s latest insider trading tracker page.

The heavy selling pushed the stock around -15% lower in the three days of trading. HYMC remains marginally higher with a 7.7% gain for 2022 after being up more than 300% by the end of March.

The filing highlighted that the New York based private equity fund manager headed by Jason Mudrick sold a total of 2.38 million shares in several transactions that occurred between Wednesday and Friday. The average sale price across all transactions was 70.35 cents per share with a total transaction value of $1.68 million.

This latest transaction will reduce Mudrick’s remaining share ownership to 22.01 million equating to around ~11% ownership of the float, down from ~12.2%.

The change in ownership will result in Cinema operator AMC Entertainment (US:AMC), moving up to the largest holder on the register with ~11.7% ownership from 23.5 million shares owned. The cinema operator made its controversial equity investment in early March alongside Eric Sprott in a $56 million private placement.

This latest transaction has pushed down HYMC’s fund sentiment score to 46.06. The score ranks Hycroft Mining in the bottom 50% of 36,246 screened global securities. Despite the below average levels of fund buying activity, the miner still has 169 institutions on the register that collectively own 46.61 million shares on the register.

Some of the other largest holders on the register include: Geode Capital Management, State Street Corp, Renaissance Technologies, First Manhattan Co and Susquehanna International Group.

Earlier in the week, Hycroft announced to investors that it had reduced its outstanding debt balances by around $12.2 million in two transactions. The group’s CEO and President Diane Garrett commented, telling investors “Eliminating a portion of our debt at a significant discount is an important step in our commitment to strengthening our balance sheet”. Garrett also told investors in the press release that the current cash balance exceeds $140 million.

HYMC last reported a debt balance of around $142.5 million on the balance sheet in early November during the release of third quarter results.

During the result, HYMC also told investors that revenue from operations declined from $31.7 million in 2021 to $8.8 million in the same quarter of 2022. Net losses also narrowed from -$23.2 million to -$15.8 million over the same period.

Hycroft Mining has fallen 3 ranks this week and is currently the 149th most popular held stock by retail investors.

This article originally appeared on Fintel

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