Ryufin research · Nov 2, 2026
What insiders bought and sold
Every director, officer and 10% owner of a US-listed company has to report a trade in its stock on a Form 4 within two business days. We added up twelve months of those filings, to Oct 29, 2026, for the 1,713 companies worth $2 billion or more, counting only buys and sales on the open market. Insiders sold $174B and bought $10.3B: 17 dollars sold for every dollar bought.
The findings
Open-market trades only: grants, option exercises, tax withholding and gifts are left out.
sold · $10.3B bought
companies with net buying · against 1,359 with net selling
of the selling · under a 10b5-1 plan set in advance
- Selling is the rule. Insiders sold at 1,474 of the 1,713 companies and bought at 655; at 1,359 they sold more than they bought, at 215 the other way round. That is ordinary: pay arrives in shares, and selling is how it turns into money. A purchase is the rarer signal, because there is only one reason to make it.
- The big money is not the executives’. 10% owners, the funds, founders’ vehicles and parent companies that hold a tenth or more, sold $103B, much of it in secondary offerings. Directors sold $70.2B and officers $50.6B, against $956M that officers bought.
- It is concentrated. The ten largest sellers account for 31% of all the selling, led by Medline Inc. (MDLN) at $14.3B net. The typical company had 5 insiders selling.
- 25% of the selling ran under a 10b5-1 plan, a trading schedule fixed months ahead that says little about what the seller thinks today; the other 75% was not marked as planned.
- Buying is most common in financial services, where insiders bought at 47% of companies, and least common in technology, 31%, where insiders sold $44.2B and bought $484M.
- The largest net buying was at Republic Services (RSG), $1.6B; 28 companies saw a cluster of buying, three or more insiders buying within one month, in the last 90 days.
Who sold
Open-market sales by role; one person can hold more than one role.
- 10% owners$103B
- Directors$70.2B
- Officers$50.6B
- Others$7.6B
Where insiders buy at all
Share of companies with at least one open-market purchase, by sector.
Cluster buying
Three or more insiders buying on the open market within one month, in the last 90 days.
The largest net buying
Purchases minus sales over twelve months.
The twelve-month league table, updated nightly, is on biggest insider buying.
The largest net selling
Sales minus purchases over twelve months; mostly large holders selling down.
How it was measured
From the SEC’s Form 3, 4 and 5 data sets and the filings themselves, matched to each company by its SEC identifier. Only open-market purchases (transaction code P) and sales (code S) count, valued at the price filed. A sale counts as planned when the filing ticks the 10b5-1 box, mandatory since April 2023. Companies worth $2 billion or more today; 9whose ticker once belonged to another company were left out. Each company’s own record, trade by trade, is on its Ownership page, for example NVIDIA’s.
The full table, one row per company, is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0: insider-trading-2026.json. Please cite “Ryufin, What insiders bought and sold (2026)” with a link to this page.