Insider buying increased last week with insiders buying $103.49 million of stock compared to $85.92 million in the week prior. Selling on the other hand decreased slightly with insiders selling $2.15 billion of stock last week compared to $2.2 billion in the week prior.

Amongst the insider purchases this week, the purchases by a trio of insiders at real estate investment and services company Kennedy-Wilson Holdings (KW) stood out the most and is probably worth exploring further. The company has been growing both the top line and their bottom line at a rapid clip over the last three years and the high valuation investors have afforded the company reflects this growth. As is usually the case with high growth companies, the stock can be very volatile and Kennedy-Wilson’s stock was no exception, losing 40% of its value from December 1, 2015 through February 11, 2016. Beyond general market weakness, I have not been able to determine a reason for this large drop. The stock recouped much of those losses over the last four weeks and it was interesting to see the insiders buy even after that recovery.

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 20.79. In other words, insiders sold almost 21 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares favorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 25.65. 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:

1. Seattle Genetics, Inc. (SGEN): $33.36

Director Felix Baker acquired 1,043,989 shares of this biotech company, paying $32.36 per share for a total amount of $33.78 million. These shares were purchased indirectly by Baker Bros. Advisors LP.