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Insider Weekends – December 7, 2012

  • December 8, 2012

Welcome to edition 131 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying increased with insiders purchasing $41.43 million of their stock last week compared to $31.13 million in the week prior. Selling also increased with insiders selling $2.32 billion of stock last week compared to $1.94 billion 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 dropped to 55.88. In other words, insiders sold almost 56 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares favorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 62.4. 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:

There were several noteworthy insider purchases this week that did not make the cut because they were not the 5 largest purchases. The ones worth mentioning include a small 23,010 share purchase by the COO of Hewlett Packard (HPQ) after the stock hit a multi-year low last month, an 8,000 share purchase worth nearly half a million dollars by the Controller of coal producer Alliance Resource Partners (ARLP) and purchases of Inphi Corporation (IPHI) by both its CEO and CFO.

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