Benzinga's Insider Buys Of The Week: BeiGene, Opko Health And More

• Insider buying can be an encouraging signal for potential investors.
• Insiders at three companies made notable share purchases last week.
• And two of the insiders featured here are regular acquirers of shares.

Conventional wisdom says that insiders and 10-percent owners only buy shares of a company for one reason — they believe the stock price will rise and they want to profit from it. So insider buying can be an encouraging signal for potential investors, particularly in an overpriced market or after disappointing news

Here's a look at some notable insider purchases reported in the past week.

Beigene Ltd BGNE saw beneficial owner-director Baker Bros. Advisors scoop up more than 1.98 million shares of this Chinese biotech at a price of $101 apiece, for a total just short of $200 million. That brought the stake of the Baker Bros. partnership to more than 5.12 million shares, or about 10 percent of the total outstanding.

See also: Seed Fundraising: 10 Traits Of Successful Founders

Biglari Holdings Inc BH founder and CEO Sardar Biglari has acquired about 3,500 more shares of this restaurant chain operator. At between $410.36 and $412.66 per share, that cost him more than $1.44 million. Note that Biglari is a frequent buyer of small batches of shares, and his stake is most recently listed as more than 696,000 shares.

The owner of Steak 'n Shake and Maxim magazine recently announced plans to reorganize itself as a holding company with a dual-class structure, with the aim of preserving Biglari's control of the company. The stock closed most recently at $418.73, which is above Biglari's latest purchase prices. The share price is fractionally lower year to date.

At Opko Health Inc. OPK, chairman and CEO Phillip Frost has resumed his habit of frequently buying batches of shares. Most recently that was 375,000 shares of this medical test and medication company. At share prices ranging from $4.40 to $4.99, that totaled almost $1.79 million. Before this, Frost's most recent reported purchase of shares was back in September.

This week it was announced that president of BioReference Laboratories, an Opko subsidiary, had resigned. Shares of this Miami-based company rose almost 8 percent in the past week and closed on Friday at $4.88 apiece. The stock has traded as high as $8.92 a share in the past 52 weeks.

At the time of this writing, the author had no position in the mentioned equities.

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