Welcome to edition 296 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying more than doubled again last week with insiders buying $540.45 million of stock compared to $252.12 million in the week prior. Selling also increased with insiders selling $938.04 million of stock last week compared to $693.93 million in the week prior.

A big part of this jump in insider buying was driven by a $205 million purchase of cancer-focused biotech company Incyte Corporation (INCY) by the multi-billion dollar hedge fund Baker Brothers. We normally tend to exclude purchases by funds but decided to make an exception in this case because one of the Baker Brothers, Julian Baker, serves on the board of Incyte and because they are well known in the biotech industry to have an excellent track record. It was interesting to see that their last reported purchases of Incyte were back in late 2011 and early 2012 at prices ranging from $12.21 to $16.53.

Beyond the Baker Brothers purchases, there were other insiders that stepped up to the plate last week even as the S&P 500 rallied almost 3% for the week. Some of the noteworthy purchases that did not make the top 5 list include a $5 million purchase by the CEO of Akamai Technologies (AKAM), a nearly $1.2 million purchase by the CEO of payment services provider First Data (FDC) and a dual purchase at Twitter (TWTR) by its Executive Chairman and by the CFO Anthony Noto who has been consistently buying shares every few months.

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 1.74. In other words, insiders sold almost 2 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares favorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 2.75. 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.