Welcome to edition 473 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying declined for the third week in a row with insiders purchasing $54.38 million of stock last week compared to $58.39 million in the week prior. Selling also decreased with insiders selling $613.73 million of stock last week compared to $704.94 million in the week prior.
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 11.29. In other words, insiders sold more than 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 12.07.
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. Eidos Therapeutics, Inc. (EIDX): $39.97
Chief Executive Officer Neil Kumar acquired 882,353 shares of this biotech company, paying $29.90 per share for a total amount of $26.38 million. These shares were purchased indirectly by BridgeBio Pharma LLC. This could have been some sort of a private placement as Eidos did not trade this many shares on the date of this purchase and the market price was also much higher. There was nothing in the form 4 filing or the footnotes to indicate this was not an open market purchase.