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Welcome to edition 347 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying increased last week with insiders buying $24.08 million of stock compared to $22.23 million in the week prior. Selling on the other hand declined with insiders selling $1.53 billion of stock last week compared to $2.68 billion in the week prior. Even as we approach the end of earnings season, insider buying continues to remain anemic and is a tiny fraction of what we saw in the first two weeks of last February. Despite the small number of transactions, there were some interesting purchases including some that did not make the top 5 list as discussed 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 63.73. In other words, insiders sold almost 64 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares favorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 120.44.
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. Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. (WBA): $83.31
Co-Chief Operating Officer Ornella Barra acquired 124,000 shares of this pharmacy-led health and wellbeing company, paying $80.93 per share for a total amount of $10.04 million. Mr. Barra increased his stake by 7.88% to 1,697,438 shares with this purchase.