Insider Trading Report Edition #197: Notable Buys And Sales

Welcome to edition 197 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying decreased last week with insiders purchasing $28.5 million of their stock compared to $54.45 million in the week prior. Selling declined sharply for a second week with insiders selling $675.91 million of stock last week compared to $1.49 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 24.9. In other words, insiders sold almost 25 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares favorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 27.42. 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 March 28, 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. Biglari Holdings Inc. (BH): $483.47

Shares of this restaurant holding company were acquired by 2 insiders:

• Chairman and CEO Sardar Biglari, acquired 6,076 shares, paying $496.66 per share for a total amount of $3.02 million. Mr. Biglari, increased his stake by 31.20% to 25,552 shares with this purchase.
• Director James P. Mastrian acquired 100 shares, paying $494.09 per share for a total amount of $49,409. These shares were purchased indirectly by Mr. Mastrain’s spouse.

Activist hedge fund manager Sardar Biglari has used Biglari Holding to either acquire entire companies like the Steak n Shake restaurant chain or activist positions in companies like Cracker Barrel (CBRL). The Restaurant Investor is a very interesting profile of Sardar Biglari written by Max Olson, the CEO of Max Capital.

You can view the list of recent insider transactions for Biglari Holdings Inc. here.