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Welcome to edition 270 of Insider Weekends. Insiders remained very active this week despite the big decline we just experienced that saw the Dow lose 1,000 points in a week. Insider buying increased last week with insiders buying $121.15 million of stock compared to $109.95 million in the week prior. Selling also increased with insiders selling $2.12 billion of stock last week compared to $999.89 million 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 17.47. In other words, insiders sold more than 17 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares unfavorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 9.09. 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 interesting insider purchases besides the five listed below that did not make the list of the top 5 transactions. Some of those include a cluster purchase by four insiders of car rental company Hertz Global (HTZ), additional purchases of Sears Holdings (SHLD) by 10% owner Bruce Berkowitz, purchases by the CEO and VP Sales of silicon wafer manufacturing company SunEdison Semiconductor (SEMI) and purchases by two insiders of insurance company Genworth Financial (GNW). We also excluded a $20 million purchase by Elon Musk of Tesla Motors (TSLA) because it was part of a 2.7 million share secondary offering by the company.