Insider Trading Report Edition #187: Notable Buys And Sales

Insider buying increased last week with insiders purchasing $17.78 million of their stock compared to $3.38 million in the week prior. Selling also increased with insiders selling $831.24 million of stock last week compared to $702.52 million 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 decreased to 46.76. In other words, insiders sold almost 47 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares favorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at a record 207.91.

Follow up:

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 January 17, 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. Dycom Industries Inc. (DY): $28.80

Director Charles B. Coe acquired 15,000 shares of this engineering and specialty contracting services provider, paying $27.99 per share for a total amount of $419,850. Mr. Coe increased his stake by 95.04% to 30,782 shares with this purchase.

This is the most interesting purchase of the group of insider purchases this week. The company is growing revenue rapidly and trades at a reasonable 7 times EBITDA.

You can view the list of recent insider transactions for Dycom Industries Inc. here.