Insider buying increased last week with insiders buying $226.99 million of stock compared to $45.88 million in the week prior. Selling also increased with insiders selling $594.85 million of stock last week compared to $442.94 million in the week prior. A large part of the insider buying this week was on account of Carl Icahn purchasing a large position in liquefied natural gas company Cheniere Energy (LNG).

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 2.62. In other words, insiders sold almost 3 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares favorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 9.65. 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 October 2, 2015

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. AGCO Corporation (AGCO): $44.02

Director Mallika Srinivasan acquired 247,390 shares of this farm & construction machinery company, paying $45.73 per share for a total amount of $11.31 million. These shares were purchased indirectly by Chennai, India based TAFE Motors and Tractors Limited.

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

2. Southern Copper Corp. (SCCO): $27.61

Chairman of the Board German Larrea Velasco acquired 150,000 shares of this copper mining company, paying $25.85 per share for a total amount of $3.88 million. Mr. Velasco increased his stake by 7.81% to 2,070,567 shares with this purchase.