Welcome to edition seventy eight of Insider Weekends. Insider buying decreased with insiders purchasing $41.01 million of their stock last week compared to $130.9 million in the week prior. Selling also decreased with insiders selling $558.9 million worth of stock last week compared to $736.9 million in the week prior.
Sell/Buy Ratio: The insider Sell/Buy ratio is calculated by dividing the total insider sales in a given week by total insider purchases that week. The adjusted ratio for last week went up to 13.4. In other words, insiders sold more than 13 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares unfavorably with the week prior when the ratio stood at 5.6. We are calculating an adjusted ratio by removing transactions by funds and companies and trying as best as possible only to retain information about insiders and 10% owners who are not funds or companies.
Note: As mentioned in the first post in this series Introduction to Insider Weekends, certain industries have their preferred metrics such as same store sales for retailers, funds from operations (FFO) for REITs and revenue per available room (RevPAR) for hotels that provide a better basis for comparison than simple valuation metrics. However metrics like Price/Earnings, Price/Sales and Enterprise Value/EBITDA included below should provide a good starting point for analyzing the majority of stocks.
Notable Insider Buys:
1. American Public Education, Inc. (APEI): $38.5
Director Timothy T. Weglicki acquired 344,600 shares of this for-profit education company, paying $36.70 per share for a total amount of $12.6 million. These shares were purchaed indirectly by private equity firm ABS Capital Partners, of which Mr. Weglicki is a founding partner. He has served as a director of American Public Education since 2002 and was appointed Vice Chairman in 2010.