Insider Selling Volume at Highest Level Ever Tracked

The overwhelming volume of sell transactions relative to buy transactions by company insiders over the last six months in key leading sectors of the market is the worst Alan Newman, editor of the Crosscurrents newsletter, has ever seen since he began tracking the data.

The strategist looked at insider trading activity amongst the top ten companies that make up the Nasdaq such as Apple [ AAPL 307.83 -0.22 (-0.07%) ], Google [ GOOG 616.47 -2.13 (-0.34%) ] and Amazon [ AMZN 167.51 -2.44 (-1.44%) ].

Then he analyzed the biggest members of the Retail HOLDRs ETF like Gap [ GPS 19.34 -0.34 (-1.73%) ], Target [ TGT 52.73 -0.41 (-0.77%) ] and Costco [ COST 62.98 -0.70 (-1.10%) ], as well as the top insiders in the semiconductor industry at companies such as Altera [ ALTR 31.04 +0.71 (+2.34%) ], Broadcom [ BRCM 41.56 +4.34 (+11.66%) ] and Sandisk [ SNDK 37.87 +0.68 (+1.83%) ].

The largest companies in three of the most important leading sectors of the market have seen their executives classified as insiders sell more than 120 million shares of stock over the last six months. Top executives at these very same companies bought just 38,000 shares over that same time period, making for an eye-popping sell to buy ratio of 3,177 to one.