Who's Buying Now?

It's a new week, which means it's time to check the most interesting insider purchases. After reading through numerous filings using insider tracking tool Form 4 Oracle, here are my top five today.

The week's buying

Sources: Fool.com, Yahoo! Finance, Form 4 Oracle, SEC filings.

Yay for Yahoo!
Perhaps it's time to say yes to the Y! Last week, Chief Accounting Officer Michael Murray purchased 6,000 shares of Yahoo! at better than $19 each. Days before that, board member Gary Wilson added 1,000 shares to his position.

Are these guys nuts? Our Motley Fool CAPS community, 115,000-plus members strong, might say so:

Data current as of Sept. 2, 2008.

You can count borisvolodnikov among the more vocal bears. "Yahoo's leadership wasn't smart enough to realize that it was more lucky than good. They failed to remain relevant and are now doomed to mediocrity," he wrote last month.

Ouch.

But not all Fools agree. "Icahn and the shareholders have woken up the CEO and he knows he will have to be very accountable to shareholders and the board. He will either get the company to outperform his competitiors or he will merge it with someone who can," wrote CAPS investor bulldogir two weeks ago.

Both pitches make sense to me. So, let's turn to the numbers. They aren't pretty; return on invested capital, at 3.5%, is barely above the historic rate of inflation. Free cash flow seems impressive at $1.6 billion over the trailing 12 months but pales when compared to the $4.1 billion search ad partner Google produced over the same period. Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), meanwhile, churned out more than $18 billion.

I knew Yahoo! was going to be the junior partner in Microhoo, but that's way too big a disparity to ignore. It suggests that, for now, the Y! is just, well, junior. And it may also explain why, even as insiders are buying, Legg Mason's (NYSE:LM) Bill Miller is selling. Wait for more insiders to buy before taking a nibble for yourself.

Whom should you trust?
Miller's selling brings up an interesting question. Whom do you trust more? Insiders? Or expert investors?

There's no easy answer but my personal litmus test contains three questions:

1. How many insiders are buying?
2. Do they outnumber sellers?
3. What's the record of the investor who is selling?

On these, 99 Cents Only Stores doesn't score high. Chairman David Gold and wife Sherry together were buying in bulk last week and, while their buying easily outweighed fund manager Chuck Akre's selling over the past seven days, the Golds are very recent shoppers. Akre has been buying and selling since at least February. Overall, sellers easily outpace buyers over the past year.

And Akre's overall record as an investor is stellar; his FBR Focus (FBRVX) fund, though on a losing streak recently, has earned a 15% average annual return over the past decade, easily outpacing category peers.

Whom do I trust? Here, it's Akre. Only one insider (i.e., Gold) is buying and the CAPS community, with a two-star rating, doesn't like his business very much at these levels. Akre, also a skeptic, recently sent a letter to the board asking it to explain the rationale behind what seems to be an ill-fated strategy for the Texas market.

There's your update. See you back here next week when we dig through more insider filings in search of the next home run stock.

Get the inside scoop on stocks of all sizes with related Foolishness:

• Find out who was buying last time.
• Please don't ignore this growth story.
• Dear Senator Obama ...
• Here's how to profit from Wall Street's misfortune.