Welcome to edition 141 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying dropped nearly in half with insiders purchasing $27.62 million of their stock last week compared to $53.87 million in the week prior. Selling also decreased with insiders selling $1.29 billion of stock last week compared to $1.65 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 went up to 46.7. In other words, insiders sold almost 47 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares unfavorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 30.7. This is the fifth week in a row the insider Sell/Buy ratio has gone up in tandem with the market. 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. Murphy Oil Corporation (MUR): $61.35
Director Claiborne P. Deming acquired 80,000 shares of this oil & gas exploration & production company, paying $60.34 per share for a total amount of $4.83 million. Mr. Deming increased his stake by 11.71% to 763,330 shares with this purchase.