I have been looking up at our alert feed, and with the number of Bearish Insider Sentiment alerts we got yesterday, we can see that the trend, which has been Bullish in the last few weeks, is clearly reversing.
It started slowly last week, and it is accelerating at a very fast pace this week.
After weeks of being bullish, Insider Sentiment is turning bearish
Sentiment Report for last week.
In the week ended February 10, we recorded 1034 open-market insider trades at 492 companies having a total value of $9.8 billion. Transaction dollar volume was 363.3% higher than the previous week and 103.9% higher when compared to insider trading activity a year ago. Purchases accounted for 11.8% of all open-market trades last week. Our insider sell-to-buy ratio, which excludes derivative conversions and certain other types of transactions, ended the week at 7.62, down slightly from a previous reading of 7.88. On average, a sell-to-buy ratio below 4 is considered bullish, while readings above 7 are bearish.
For the 3rd consecutive week, activity was the most concentrated in the Technology sector, where 226 insiders filed trades having an aggregate market value of $292 million. Rounding out the top three sectors were Financials (180 trades for $69.6 million) and Industrials (165 trades for $182.4 million). There was a large spike in activity in the Consumer Staples sector, where the number of trades filed was up 127% on the previous week.