We’ve got a holiday-shortened week, and a pretty quiet week when it comes to the Real Money Portfolio… but we did get an interesting update from one of our long-time holdings, and I’ve got a few other (brief) thoughts to share with those few of you who aren’t lolling on a beach somewhere and enjoying an extended Independence Day holiday.

It’s been an interesting few weeks for Boston Omaha (BOC), at least as far as SEC filings go — first because of pretty strong surge of insider buying, and then with their first proxy following the departure of co-CEO Alex Rozek.

Insiders have been buying repeatedly as the shares fall, which on average is a good thing — though now that insider buying is so closely tracked, and reported by so many websites, these things can also be orchestrated among C-suite executives who are trying to stop a free-fall in the share price. The Chief Financial Officer and Chief Accounting Officer have both been buying shares on the open market in the past couple weeks, as have several board members, but probably most notable is the fact that the remaining CEO, Adam Peterson, has been buying up shares for his personal account, with several purchases in June as the stock dipped below $14 — this doesn’t have a huge impact on the shares he controls, since he votes all of the shares owned by his Magnolia hedge fund(s), too, but these were all personal buys, of about 59,000 shares in total. That’s a total personal purchase of roughly $800,000 worth of shares recently, which should be a meaningful amount to Peterson, and more than a “token” buy to get attention.

He can afford it, of course, not least because he got that one huge bonus in 2021 ($7.5 million), but that maxed out his potential bonus pool for a decade — his annual salary, the only real compensation he’s been entitled to since that one-time bonus, was only $600,000 in 2022 and $639,000 in 2023. Poor guy.

So I was glad to see more of that “skin in the game” buying from the executive team… but what I’ve really been curious about as we move into this new era, with Adam Peterson as the solo CEO, was how the executive compensation might change, and whether they would reset the bonus pool to allow Peterson to again to be ...