Insiders are Buying

From The Star-Tribune.

Stock purchases by company officers and directors ... is growing evidence that insiders believe their companies have the worst of the recession behind them and their stocks should rise this year, analysts said last week.

"This is incredibly positive," said Brian Flanagan, a stock portfolio manager at Thrivent Financial who tracks insider trading. "The sell-to-buy ratio is incredibly low. Most of the buying has been in smaller-cap stocks and the financial companies."

On my Bloomberg today, there were 51 pages of companies with insider buying and 29 pages of insider selling.  I do not know how this typically compares since I just found the page today. However, insider selling usually outpaces insider buying significantly. 

For the financials, there were 23 pages of insider buying and 7 pages of insider selling.

"Insiders across the market are growing bullish," said Ben Silverman, director of research at Insiderscore.com. "The ratio of buying to selling in recent days has been 3-to-1 for insiders, and that's a high ratio. Over the last 52 weeks, the ratio has been about 1.8 to 1. There really are two reasons to buy: You believe the stock is going up, or your employment contract requires you to buy the stock." ...

Thomson Reuters' insider report shows buying by insiders at Standard & Poor's 500 companies tripled in February to more than $29.6 million compared with January.

Insider buying is not a particularly good indicator of near-term market direction but it is usually a pretty good signal of valuation and long-term prospects.

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