Insider Trading Report Edition 289: Notable Buys And Sales

Happy New Year and welcome to edition 289 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying decreased last week with insiders buying $42.25 million of stock compared to $60.29 million in the week prior. Selling also decreased with insiders selling $359.11 million of stock last week compared to $522.92 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 dropped to 8.49. In other words, insiders sold more than 8 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares favorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 8.67. 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.

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. Prospect Capital Corporation (PSEC): $6.98

Shares of this business development company were acquired by 2 insiders:

• Chief Executive Officer John F. Barry acquired 2,061,424 shares, paying $7.26 per share for a total amount of $14.97 million. Mr. Barry increased his stake by 18.89% to 12,971,606 shares with this purchase.
• Chief Operating Officer Grier M. Eliasek acquired 50,000 shares, paying $7.10 per share for a total amount of $355,000. Mr. Eliasek increased his stake by 8.66% to 627,196 shares with this purchase.

You can view the list of recent insider transactions for Prospect Capital Corporation here.