Welcome to edition 536 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying decreased last week with insiders purchasing $119.27 million of stock compared to $138.44 million in the week prior. It was interesting to see that three out of the five companies in our top five insider buys were from the hard hit energy sector and each of these companies has lost more than half their value in the last year. Selling also decreased with insiders selling $1.69 billion of stock last week compared to $2.17 billion 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 14.23. In other words, insiders sold more than 14 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares favorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 15.69.
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. Continental Resources, Inc. (CLR): $12.3
Executive Chairman Harold Hamm acquired 769,235 shares of this crude oil and natural gas company, paying $12.68 per share for a total amount of $9.75 million. Mr. Hamm increased his stake by 6.26% to 13,062,904 shares with this purchase.