Welcome to edition 256 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying almost doubled again last week with insiders buying $143.37 million of stock compared to $74.57 million in the week prior. Selling also increased with insiders selling $1.83 billion of stock last week compared to $1.04 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 down to 12.77. In other words, insiders sold almost 13 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares favorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 13.99. We are calculating an adjusted ratio by removing transactions by funds and companies and trying as best as possible only to retain information about insiders and 10% owners who are not funds or companies.
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:
While the top 5 insiders purchases this week are worth checking out, there were a large number of other purchases that looked a whole lot more interesting but were not large enough to make the top 5 list. Some of them include a cluster of purchases by 6 insiders of car security company LoJack (LOJN) following the release of Q1 results last week, purchases by the CEO and the President of TrueCar (TRUE), a $1 million purchase by the President of single-family property REIT Altisource Residential (RESI) and purchases by two directors of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR) following the big drop in the stock last week. The purchases by the insiders of LoJack were interesting to watch as they kept buying at ever higher prices. The stock is already up 49% since the company announced results on May 7th and the insider purchase filings started rolling in.
1. Chevron Corporation (CVX): $108.03
