Insider Radar — Week of July 20, 2026
Insider selling in the week of July 20 fell to $815.8 million, the lowest weekly total in AlphaAI's Form 4 coverage. The cause was not a wave of conviction. The large blocks that normally carry these totals simply did not appear, and exactly one filing in the entire US market cleared $50 million. Buying was quiet too at $114.6 million, and nearly half of that was IPO and placement money rather than anyone's read on their own stock.
Insider selling in the week of July 20, 2026 fell to $815.8 million, the lowest weekly total in AlphaAI's Form 4 coverage and 62 percent below the quietest week of the preceding two months. Exactly one Form 4 filing in the entire US market cleared $50 million, Frank Slootman's pre-scheduled $82.3 million sale of Snowflake (SNOW), against four to thirteen such filings in every one of the previous nine weeks. The sell-to-buy ratio of 7.1 to 1 sits well under the 17.8 to 1 recent median, but that reflects selling drying up rather than buying arriving: purchases totalled $114.6 million and 47 percent of that was IPO and placement money.
The week the big sellers did not show up
Insiders disposed of $815.8M of stock, the lowest weekly total in our Form 4 coverage and 62% below the $2.14B of the week of July 6, which was the quietest week of the preceding two months. What is missing is the tail. In each of the previous nine weeks, between four and thirteen individual filings cleared $50M. This week there was exactly one: Frank Slootman's pre-scheduled sale of 289,685 Snowflake (SNOW) shares on July 20 and 21 for $82.3M. In six of those nine weeks the single largest filing was at least $300M. Here the largest was $82.3M.
The shrinkage runs through the whole distribution, not just the top of it. There were 356 disposition events against 560 the week before, and the average one was $2.3M against $3.8M. Fewer insiders sold, and the ones who did sold smaller.
Of the $677.6M sold on the open market, $462.0M (68%) came from pre-scheduled 10b5-1 plans set months earlier, which say nothing about the current quarter. Micron (MU) CEO Sanjay Mehrotra's filings totalling $37.3M and Datadog's (DDOG) selling across three executives were on plans. That leaves $215.6M of discretionary selling across the entire US market, and the largest piece of it was a fund rather than an operator: BBRC International sold $25.7M of Victoria's Secret (VSXY) on July 22. The largest discretionary sale by a sitting executive anywhere was United Airlines (UAL) CEO Scott Kirby at $18.8M.
| Ticker | Seller | Role | Sold | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SNOW | Frank Slootman | Director | $82.3M | 10b5-1 plan |
| BEIGF | John Oyler | CEO | $34.6M | 10b5-1 plan |
| MU | Sanjay Mehrotra | President and CEO | $29.0M | 10b5-1 plan |
| VSXY | BBRC International Pte Ltd | 10% owner | $25.7M | Discretionary |
| UAL | Scott Kirby | CEO | $18.8M | Discretionary |
| LQDA | Stephen Bloch | Director | $17.8M | Discretionary |
| CRWV | Michael Intrator | CEO and 10% owner | $15.6M | 10b5-1 plan |
| PBF | Control Empresarial de Capitales | 10% owner | $14.1M | Discretionary |
| BFLY | Jonathan Rothberg | Director and 10% owner | $12.9M | 10b5-1 plan |
| TDG | W. Nicholas Howley | Director | $12.3M | 10b5-1 plan |
Nearly half the buying was IPO and placement money
Insiders bought $114.6M across 128 events, and that number needs unpacking before it means anything. The largest purchase of the week was the Scribe Therapeutics (SCTX) IPO. The gene editing company priced an upsized offering at $15.00 a share on July 24, raising $129M, and director and 10% holder Behzad Aghazadeh took $35.0M of it at the offer price. He added $1.1M at $22.31 once the stock started trading, and the chief business officer and chief financial officer bought $85,000 between them at the same $15.00. Subscribing to an offering you helped bring public is not the signal that buying your own stock in the open market is.
Four more entries have the same shape. B&R Technology Sponsor put $6.9M into B&R Technology Merger Corp (BRTM) at a flat $10.00, sponsor capital alongside that SPAC's $325M IPO which priced on July 20. Five directors of Five Star Bancorp (FSBC) bought $6.3M on July 22, every one of them at exactly $44.00. ClearSign Technologies (CLIR) announced a private placement of $1,770,000 on July 23, which is the same figure that appears as 10% holder John Pasquesi's purchase. Star Fashion Culture (STFS) CFO Zhang Pingting took 2,000,000 shares at a flat $1.30. Together with Scribe, those five come to $53.8M, or 47% of the week's buying, and not one of them is a market order.
Two names are the real thing. 51Talk (COE) CEO Jack Jiajia Huang bought $22.8M across the week at prices between $15.54 and $16.68, part of a run in which he has bought on every trading day from July 8 through July 23. Aqua Capital bought 60,000 shares of Energizer (ENR) every single day of the week, $6.1M at prices between $19.67 and $21.09, continuing an accumulation that began on June 17. Both are flagged as 10% owners, which is worth saying out loud because it breaks the usual shortcut: filter to 10% holders and you sweep up the IPO and placement money along with them. One more chart entry needs a footnote: CLBK's $4.8M is a cluster of small filings with no single one above $1.8M.
| Ticker | Buyer | Role | Bought | How |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SCTX | Behzad Aghazadeh, plus two officers | Director and 10% owner | $36.2M | IPO at $15.00, plus aftermarket |
| COE | Jack Jiajia Huang | CEO and 10% owner | $22.8M | Open market, all week |
| PBLS | RA Capital Management | Director and 10% owner | $6.9M | Open market |
| BRTM | B&R Technology Sponsor LLC | 10% owner | $6.9M | SPAC sponsor at $10.00 |
| GSHD | Durable Capital Partners | 10% owner | $6.6M | Open market |
| FSBC | Five directors | Directors | $6.3M | Fixed price, $44.00 |
| ENR | Aqua Capital, Ltd. | 10% owner | $6.1M | Open market, every day |
| ZSTK | Michael Heinrich | Executive Chairman | $3.5M | Fixed price, $0.75 |
Three take-privates closed in the same five days
Separate from open-market activity, $138.2M of dispositions were sale-to-issuer (D code) transactions, and nearly all of it came from three acquisitions completing inside the same week. KORE Group (KORE) went private at $9.25 a share backed by Searchlight Capital and Abry Partners, converting $56.7M of insider holdings across ten filings. Berkshire Hathaway closed its $8.5B purchase of Taylor Morrison (TMHC) at $72.50, which accounted for $42.1M across eight filings and was reported as Greg Abel's first major deal as Warren Buffett's successor. Cross Country Healthcare (CCRN) completed its own take-private at $13.25, another $36.1M across eleven filings.
These are worth isolating because a screen that simply sums Form 4 disposition codes reads them as insiders selling. Nobody at those three companies made a decision that week. Every holder was cashed out on the same day at the same fixed price, the chief executive and the vice president alike, and the whole board files at once. The three deals are 17% of the $815.8M headline disposition figure and 98% of all sale-to-issuer volume in the window.
Methodology
Covers SEC Form 4 filings for transactions dated July 20 to July 26, 2026, grouped into economic events by ticker, filing, transaction code and ownership form, and ranked on the summed value of each group. Events above $1 billion are excluded as almost always merger, tender or reorganization dispositions rather than discretionary trades; no event in this window reached that threshold. 'Buying' is non-derivative purchase (P) transactions. 'Open-market selling' is sale (S) transactions. 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. Form 4 values are shares times price with no currency normalization, and foreign issuers file in the local currency of the traded security: one ASE Technology (ASX) sale reported at 665.00 per ordinary share is Taiwan dollars rather than US dollars, and it is excluded from every figure on this page. The sell-to-buy ratio is compared against the median of recent steady-state weeks with over $10M of buying (17.8×, from 10 weeks; filing coverage matured in mid-2026, so the baseline is short). Roles come from each filing's officer, director and 10 percent owner flags together with the reported title; where the flags are empty the filer 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 444 filings, $105.8M of buying and $807.1M of selling. The restatement confirmed this issue's central finding: the week of July 20 really was the quietest in coverage, and every headline claim survived with the corrected data. This is a filtered readout of public filings, not investment advice.
Sources: SEC EDGAR (Form 4 filings)
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