Menu
Welcome to edition 391 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying increased last week with insiders purchasing $182.68 million of stock compared to $117.17 million in the week prior. Selling decreased with insiders selling $1.76 billion of stock last week compared to $1.84 billion in the week prior.
More than half of the insider buying last week was related to 10% owner Shanda Media, part of the Singapore-based private investment firm Shanda Group, purchasing over $107 million worth of Lending Club (LC) stock on the open market. Following these purchases Shanda Media now owns over 20% of the company. On December 11th, their buying represented nearly a third of the trading volume for the stock and at one point the stock was up 26% since the Dec 8th close before settling down to a gain of 15% for the week. The CEO, CFO and a director also picked up a small amount of shares last month.
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 declined to 9.62. In other words, insiders sold almost 10 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares favourably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 15.72.
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. Discovery Communications, Inc. (DISCA): $21.04
Shares of this global media company were acquired by 2 insiders: