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Welcome to edition 122 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying declined for the fourth week in a row with insiders purchasing just $12.04 million of their stock last week compared to $22.92 million in the week prior. Selling also declined with insiders selling $983.98 million worth of stock last week compared to $1.03 billion in the week prior. Insider buying generally declines at the start of each quarter and starts picking back up as we get into earnings season. A large part of insider sales had to do with insiders of Dollar General (DG) selling stock in a secondary offering.
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 81.72. In other words, insiders sold almost 82 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares unfavorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 44.8. The Sell/Buy ratio would have dropped to 49.23 excluding a large $391.18 million sale by a director of Dollar General, which was an indirect sale by Goldman Sachs in a secondary offering. 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, 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. Contango Oil & Gas Company (MCF): $50.8
Shares of this independent oil & gas company were acquired by 3 insiders: