Top insider trades (Wed, Feb 4)

Connor’s Commentary

There were 168 new insider trades filed.

Two insider trades were flagged as High Signal. CEO Watcher Premium subs can see those in the Trade Notes section of this email or the CEO Watcher Premium Dashboard that is linked in the Data Dump section.

As a reminder, if you upgrade to CEO Watcher Premium (link) and find that it isn’t for you, I’ll give you a refund.

• Saba Capital bought another $544k of ASA Gold and Precious Metals (ASA)

• Zenas Biopharma (ZBIO) CEO is buying the dip again (another $1M purchase)

• A director at Agilysis (AGYS) is buying the post-earnings dip. This $50k purchase is their second largest, out of 14

• Another director at Community Bancorp (CMTV) bought the stock. This $126k purchase is the insider’s largest purchase, out of 5

• A second insider just bought Worthington Steel (WS) this week. A director bought $100k

• A director at Kinder Morgan (KMI) bought $90k of the stock. It's their first purchase since 2020

• A senior VP at General Electric (GE) sold $1.22M of the stock for the first time ever

• The Chief Legal Officer at Intel (INTC) sold $1M of the stock, but they are just selling a portion of their Performance Stock Units that vested

• 8 insiders at Ionis Pharmaceuticals (IONS) sold a combined $8M of the stock

• AE Red Holdings sold another $34M of Redwire Corp (RDW). That’s now $400M in sales in 2026

• The CEO at AAR Corp (AIR) sold another $1M. This is his 4th sale in 2026

• and more…

Commentary

Using insider sales to identify stocks likely to deliver negative forward returns is very difficult.

Using insider sales to identify stocks likely to underperform the market is quite easy.

A large part of this is just because most stocks underperform the market. The chart below from Archbridge (link) shows that for the 20-year period from 1997-2017, the average stock in the S&P rose 228%, while the median only rose 50%.

So while most stocks do go up, most go up much less than the market does.

A couple of other related data points are that only 4% of companies have delivered the entire net gain of the stock market since 1926 (link), and SPY (market-cap-weighted S&P 500 ETF) has outperformed RSP (equally weighted) since 2015.

Not only do most stocks underperform the market, but over the last decade, it’s been the largest stocks that have driven most of the performance.

All of this data helps explain why it’s fairly easy to use insider selling to identify stocks that will underperform, but much harder to find stocks that will fall.

But another reason that aggregate insider selling stats don’t tend to be very useful is that ~25% of insider selling happens at tech companies (according to our data), and 1) tech companies have had incredible performance over the last decade, and 2) almost all of the insider selling at tech companies is useless.

Our data shows that, on average, insider sales underperform the S&P. However, when you look at only tech insider sales, they actually outperform the S&P.

Obviously, a large part of this is because tech stocks have performed so well overall.

But why would insiders sell the stock if it’s going to perform well?

The answer lies in their compensation.

Tech employees receive a significant portion of their compensation in stock that vests every year.

When you dive into the list of companies with the most Stock-Based Compensation (as a percentage of their sales), it is nearly all tech companies.

Most of these employees sell the stock upon vesting because they continue to receive additional shares each year. They essentially treat it as a cash bonus.

That’s why the insider trading chart at most tech companies looks like this. The red bars are sales. The green bars (there aren’t any) are buys.

For the sanity of tech investors everywhere, I recommend ignoring insider selling at tech companies.

keep scrolling. top trades + all of the charts and data below

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