Insider Trading Report Edition 255: Notable Buys And Sales

Welcome to edition 255 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying more than doubled last week with insiders buying $74.57 million of stock compared to $32.77 million in the week prior. Selling on the other hand decreased with insiders selling $1.04 billion of stock last week compared to $1.15 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 13.99. In other words, insiders sold almost 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 35.02. 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 May 8, 2015

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): $41.13

Director Felix Baker acquired 1,032,664 shares of this biotech company, paying $35.56 per share for a total amount of $36.72 million. These shares were acquired indirectly through a fund.

We often exclude fund related purchases but decided to highlight this one because these shares were acquired through the highly successful biotech-focused $10 billion Baker Brothers fund. The Baker Brothers along with Randal J. Kirk are worth keeping an eye on if investing in biotech stocks is your cup of tea.

You can view the list of recent insider transactions for Seattle Genetics, Inc. here.