Welcome to edition 460 of Insider Weekends. With first quarter 2019 earnings just around the corner, both insider buying and selling remain muted and will most likely pick up over the next two to three weeks. Insider buying increased significantly last week with insiders purchasing $88.58 million of stock compared to $27.16 million in the week prior. Selling on the other hand declined with insiders selling $482.22 million of stock last week compared to $747.39 million in the week prior.
During this slow week for insider purchases, I figured I would share a picture of the Buddhist temple Byodo-In that I took last week while visiting the Hawaiian island of Oahu.
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 5.44. In other words, insiders sold more than 5 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares favorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 27.52.
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. Kinder Morgan, Inc. (KMI): $19.82
Executive Chairman Richard D. Kinder acquired 175,200 shares of this oil & gas pipelines company, paying $19.74 per share for a total amount of $3.46 million. Mr. Kinder increased his stake by 0.07% to 238,894,693 shares with this purchase.