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Personal Note: My apologies if any of you received an article about United Therapeutics (UTHR) by email on Friday. I was migrating this nearly 5 year old article from our old site to the new one and it inadvertently triggered emails to subscribers. I noticed this and attempted to stop the process but it looks a few emails made it through.
Welcome to edition 335 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying decreased last week with insiders buying $152.91 million of stock compared to $565.51 million in the week prior. Selling on the other hand nearly doubled with insiders selling $1.89 billion of stock last week compared to $991.8 million in the week prior.
Three of the notable insider purchases this week are of companies that are in the process of getting acquired (Baker Hughes), in a contentious battle to get out of an acquisition (Abbott) or the subject to multiple rounds of negotiations to be acquired (tronc). We wrote the following regarding Abbott’s acquisition of Alere in our Merger Arbitrage Mondays post two weeks ago,
On November 5, 2016, Abbott Laboratories (ABT) launched a lawsuit against Alere (ALR) for not complying with certain conditions contained in the $7.9 billion agreement. In related news, Alere’s stock was also hit after its Medicare status was revoked because a unit was alleged to have filed claims for 211 dead people over a period of five years.
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 12.36. In other words, insiders sold more than 12 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares unfavorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 1.75. 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.