Welcome to edition 231 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying decreased last week with insiders buying $68.12 million of stock compared to $73.83 million in the week prior. Selling increased a little with insiders selling $1.69 billion of stock last week compared to $1.67 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 went up to 24.94. In other words, insiders sold almost 25 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares unfavorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 22.67. 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.
Insider Sell Buy Ratio November 21, 2014
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. Ashford, Inc. (AINC): $104.52
Shares of this real estate asset management company were acquired by 2 insiders:
Ashford was spun-out from Ashford Hospitality Trust (AHT) on November 12, 2014 and started trading as a public company the following day.
I got very different historical price data from various sites but it is very clear that the stock has close to doubled during its short trading life. It is interesting to see insiders buying right after the spin-off even as the stock marched higher.
