Welcome to edition 303 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying increased significantly last week with insiders buying $119.62 million of stock compared to $26.94 million in the week prior. Selling on the other hand declined with insiders selling $906 million of stock last week compared to $1.32 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 to 7.57. In other words, insiders sold more than 7 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares favorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 48.99. 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.

While the headline numbers indicate that insider buying jumped significantly and the Sell/Buy ratio dropped, looking deeper shows that 94% of the insider buying was related to a single transaction for Transmontaigne Partners (TLP) that appears to be a private placement with various entities indirectly related to a director of the company. Removing this transaction would mean insiders just purchased $7.2 million of stock last week. Some of this muted buying could be explained by the fact that we were in the first week of the quarter and earnings related quite periods at most 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. Actuant Corporation (ATU): $24.22

Shares of this industrial products and systems company were acquired by 3 insiders: