Welcome to edition 566 of Insider Weekends. Insider buying decreased significantly last week with insiders purchasing $5.99 million of stock purchased compared to $29.53 million in the week prior. Selling also decreased significantly to $1.15 billion compared to $1.68 billion in the week prior.

I didn’t recollect seeing insider buying dry down to just about $6 million in a week in a very long time but our memories are fallible and I noticed that insider buying also dipped to this level in late January. A combination of earnings season combined with a market that is close to a new high could be weighing down insider enthusiasm.

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   In other words, insiders sold more than 192 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares unfavorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 57.06.

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.