Menu
Welcome to edition 327 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying decreased last week with insiders buying $69.44 million of stock compared to $105.2 million in the week prior. Selling also decreased significantly with insiders selling $787.01 million of stock last week compared to $1.57 billion in the week prior.
With the Federal Reserve deciding to hold interest rates at these historically low levels and punting the decision to raise rates to their December meeting, the market was in a jubilant mood and managed to rack up gains of over 1% for the week. As we enter the last week of the quarter, insider buying and selling was muted as expected and will probably continue to remain so for the next few weeks.
Beyond the top 5 insider purchases listed below, others that stood out were a $1 million purchase by the CEO of Akamai Technologies (AKAM), a $1 million purchase by the CEO of HD Supply Holdings (HDS), which was the first insider purchase at the company since 2014 and a cluster purchase by three insiders of Synergy Resources (SYRG). It was interesting to see multiple purchases in the energy sector including the Chesapeake Energy (CHK) and the Cheniere Energy (LNG) purchases mentioned below.
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 11.33. In other words, insiders sold almost 11 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares favorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 14.94. 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.