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Insider Weekends – October 3, 2014

  • October 6, 2014

Welcome to edition 224 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying increased last week with insiders buying $72.32 million of stock compared to $30.92 million in the week prior. Selling decreased with insiders selling $432.89 million of stock last week compared to $587.59 million in the week prior.

Insider buying has been lackluster over the last eight weeks and with the start of a new quarter, insider transactions will likely remain anemic for the next few weeks. Whether this decline in insider buying combined with an erratic market and increase in volatility marks an intermediate market top remains to be seen.

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 5.99. In other words, insiders sold  almost 6 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares favorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 19. 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.

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