Insider Radar — Week of July 13, 2026
Insider buying in the week of July 13 looked far heavier than normal, but almost all of it was one filing. Sumitomo Mitsui's $318.7M purchase of Jefferies stock was 70% of the week's buying, and once you also set aside $64M of preferred-stock placements, genuine officer and director conviction stayed small. Four takeovers closed in the same five days, which put another $316M of insider dispositions on the tape that had nothing to do with anyone's view of the stock.
70 percent of all US insider buying in the week of July 13, 2026 came from a single filing: Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group bought $318.7 million of Jefferies (JEF) common stock on July 15, deepening a partnership that already gives it a seat on the Jefferies board. The sell side mirrored it, with Baker Bros. Advisors' $317.8 million sale of Celcuity (CELC) making up 71 percent of all discretionary open-market selling. Set both blocks aside along with $64 million of preferred placements, and officer and director conviction buying was thin against $1.55 billion of open-market insider sales.
One bank buying another was 70% of the buy side
Insiders bought $460.5M of stock on the open market this week, the heaviest buying week in over a month. One filing accounts for almost all of the difference. Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group bought 5,906,542 Jefferies (JEF) shares at $53.96 on July 15, or $318.7M, lifting its holding to 8,566,379 shares. SMFG files as a Jefferies insider because its deputy president sits on the Jefferies board, so the purchase lands in Form 4 data as an insider buy. It is a corporate stake in a partner firm, not a personal bet by anyone running the company.
The next entries are not directional either. Prudential Financial put $60.0M into two series of Tortoise Energy Infrastructure (TYG) mandatory redeemable preferred at a flat $10.00, and Thrivent Financial for Lutherans put $4.0M into an Ares Dynamic Credit Allocation Fund (ARDC) preferred series. Both are financing for closed-end funds rather than equity conviction. Decisive Point Group's $19.1M in Standard Nuclear (STDN) priced at a flat $15.00, Fairmount's $12.4M in Crescent Biopharma (CBIO) at a flat $14.50, and Andrew Kai Kang's $10.0M in RoboStrategy (BOT) at a round $10M total all read as subscriptions rather than open-market accumulation. 51Talk's founder-CEO (COE) continued his habitual buying at $12.3M for the week.
What is left is genuinely thin. The cluster that stands out is Elevance Health (ELV), where CEO Gail Boudreaux bought 2,725 shares at $367.79 on July 17 and director Ramiro Peru added $366K the same day, after the stock had fallen about 10% over the preceding week. In a week with $460.5M of headline buying, a $1.4M cluster at an $80 billion insurer was the clearest example of insiders acting on their own read of their own company.
| Ticker | Buyer | Role | Bought |
|---|---|---|---|
| JEF | Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group | Board-deputized director | $318.7M |
| TYG | Prudential Financial | 10% owner (preferred placement) | $60.0M |
| STDN | Decisive Point Group, LLC | 10% owner | $19.1M |
| CBIO | Fairmount Funds Management | 10% owner (placement) | $12.4M |
| COE | Jack Huang | CEO / founder | $12.3M |
| BOT | Andrew Kai Kang | President and director | $10.0M |
| ENR | Aqua Capital, Ltd. | 10% owner | $4.5M |
| ARDC | Thrivent Financial for Lutherans | 10% owner (preferred placement) | $4.0M |
The selling was scheduled plans, plus one fund cutting a winner
Insiders sold $1.55B on the open market, and $1.10B of that, about 71%, was pre-scheduled 10b5-1 plan selling that carries no read on the current quarter. BeOne Medicines CEO John Oyler was the largest plan seller at $168.9M across four filings on three days. Airbnb (ABNB) co-founder Joseph Gebbia sold $74.1M, Best Buy (BBY) founder Richard Schulze $74.0M, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) CEO David Zaslav $59.5M, and Arista Networks (ANET) co-founder Andreas Bechtolsheim $54.2M, all on plans set months earlier. SharkNinja (SN) CEO Mark Barrocas sold $38.8M and Butterfly Network (BFLY) director and 10% holder Jonathan Rothberg $37.3M, also on plans.
Discretionary selling was about $448M, and a single seller was 71% of it. Baker Bros. Advisors sold 3.1 million Celcuity (CELC) shares at $102.50 on July 14, or $317.75M, a specialist biotech fund trimming a position that had appreciated sharply rather than an operator stepping away from the business. Outside of it, discretionary selling by the people who run companies was modest, an order of magnitude below the Celcuity block.
| Ticker | Seller | Role | Sold | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CELC | Baker Bros. Advisors LP | Reporting insider (fund) | $317.8M | Discretionary |
| BEIGF | John Oyler | CEO | $168.9M | 10b5-1 plan |
| ABNB | Joseph Gebbia | Director and 10% owner | $74.1M | 10b5-1 plan |
| BBY | Richard Schulze | Reporting insider | $74.0M | 10b5-1 plan |
| WBD | David Zaslav | CEO and President | $59.5M | 10b5-1 plan |
| ANET | Andreas Bechtolsheim | 10% owner | $54.2M | 10b5-1 plan |
| SN | Mark Barrocas | CEO | $38.8M | 10b5-1 plan |
| BFLY | Jonathan Rothberg | Director and 10% owner | $37.3M | 10b5-1 plan |
| DDOG | Olivier Pomel | CEO | $32.9M | 10b5-1 plan |
| NET | Michelle Zatlyn | President and Board Co-Chair | $27.4M | 10b5-1 plan |
Four takeovers closed in five days, and it shows in the raw data
Beyond the open-market sales, $315.6M of insider dispositions this week were cash-outs at fixed deal prices as acquisitions closed. Catalyst Pharmaceuticals (CPRX) accounted for $212.8M across 13 filings at exactly $31.50 a share when its acquisition completed on July 15. Whitestone REIT (WSR) added $56.5M at $19.00 on July 14, Chart Industries (GTLS) $27.1M at $210.00 on July 16, and Charter Communications (CHTR) $17.7M at $135.88. A fifth, Nuvalent (NUVL) at $124.00 following GSK's completed tender offer, was above the $1 billion single-event cutoff this report applies and is excluded entirely.
This is worth separating out because screens that simply sum Form 4 sale codes would have reported those dispositions as insider selling. Nobody at those companies chose to sell that week. They held shares in a company that was bought, and the shares converted to cash on the same day at the same price for the CEO and the junior vice president alike. Counted the naive way, deal conversions would have added about 20% to this week's selling total.
Methodology
Covers SEC Form 4 filings for transactions dated July 13 to July 19, 2026, grouped into economic events by ticker, filing, transaction code and ownership form, and scored on the summed value of each group. Events above $1 billion are excluded, as they are almost always merger, tender or reorganization dispositions rather than discretionary trades. 'Buying' is non-derivative purchase (P) transactions. 'Open-market selling' is sale (S) transactions only; sale-to-issuer (D) transactions are reported separately in the third section because in this window they were overwhelmingly merger cash-outs at fixed deal prices. A small number of filings report values in the issuer's local currency rather than dollars (United Microelectronics in Taiwan dollars, IperionX in Australian dollars, AXIA Energia in reais); those are excluded from the totals and tables. The sell/buy ratio is compared to the median of recent steady-state weeks with over $10M of buying (22.2×, from 9 weeks; filing coverage matured in mid-2026, so the baseline is short). Roles are read from each filing's officer, director and 10%-owner flags; where the flags are empty the seller is described as a reporting insider. Restated on August 6, 2026: a coverage gap in our Form 4 collector, found and fixed that day, had dropped a share of filings for this window. The figures above reflect the complete set backfilled from SEC's daily indexes; the originally published issue reported 633 filings, $449.6M of buying and $1.53B of open-market selling, and this window moved the least of the six restated weeks. The deal-conversion and plan-share analysis is unchanged. This is a filtered readout of public filings, not investment advice.
Sources: SEC EDGAR (Form 4 filings)
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