Insider buying usually tends to slow down around the start of each quarter as companies start reporting earnings. Insider buying dried up significantly over the last two weeks and the Insider Sell/Buy ratio is the highest it has been since last July if you discount the spike at the start of Q4 2011. The only insider purchases that stood out last week were a purchase of Center Bancorp (CNBC) by Director Lawrence B. Seidman and a purchase of First Citizens Bankshares (FCNCA) by Executive Vice Chairman Frank B. Holding.
As indicated in one of the daily reports, Mr. Seidman has been buying regional banks for over 26 years. Mr. Holding has also been buying First Citizen shares consistently since we started collecting insider data. The company has been trading close to or below book value for the better part of two years. Instead of writing about a specific company, I decided to take a closer look at the regional banking sector for this week’s focus article. We last wrote about the regional banking sector in April 2010 and used the 50 regional banks that were part of the KBW Regional Banking ETF (KRE) as a starting point for further research. We then identified a set of four regional banks that met the criteria set by the following four questions,