Insider Data - Week ending 12/05/2009

We are living in strange times or is it? The news coming out of Dubai would have made markets jittery for a long period of time, had we already not experienced the catastrophes in financial world last year. Quite different and less wide spread than Asian crisis of 1997, the similarity although can be drawn in the fact that Real Estate collapse played big part in both instances. But still, here we are, ten days after Dubai news. No impact. It seems like financial markets have increased their capacity for pain. Not sure if it is a good thing or bad.

Insider transactions last week were in full swing after a lull during the thanksgiving week. In fact the sell to buy ratio improved quite a bit during the latest week. Big part was played by an insider transaction in Black rock (BLK), a Half a Billion Dollar worth of buying. Even if that is excluded from the week's tally, the bullishness of the buy side insiders was impressive. Next few weeks will tell if the insider buying is a sustainable phenomenon or one time fluke. Table below shows the rolling averages for past up to 13 weeks.



Top buy and sell side transactions can be seen in the table below. Apart from BLK, Adaptec (ADPT) has shown some significant insider buying. Although the purchases have been by major investment firms (Steel Partners II LP), it still seems like significant buys. Are long term investors taking a note of it? Probably they are already.



Some significant C-Level buys are shown in the tables below



Finally, there is a change in the industry level trend among the insiders. Grocery stores have been performing well in the past two weeks, replacing Technical and system software from the top spot. Now what does that tell us? Do insiders feel that inflation would bring more revenues for grocery chains? Let us watch this interesting trend in weeks and months ahead.




The reduction in jobless claims was a welcome news towards the end of the week. Question is, would Federal reserve act or start thinking about acting to control the looming threat of inflation. Not any time soon, but I am sure it is something on Fed's radar screen and blinking amber alert.