CEOs Who Sell Millions but Never Buy

Why buying matters more than selling

Chief executives are paid largely in stock and options, so most of them sell regularly. That is normal and usually says little. Buying is different: a CEO who spends their own cash on the open market, at the same price as everyone else, is making a voluntary bet. Researchers have found purchases carry far more information than sales for exactly this reason. So the interesting question is not who sells, but who sells a lot and never buys.

The list below covers CEOs (by the title on their Form 4) who sold at least $1 million of their company's stock in our records and made no open-market purchase of it in the same period. "Never" here means not once since Feb 13, 2026, the start of our records; some may have bought earlier.

The CEOs who did buy

756 chief executives made at least one open-market purchase of their own company's stock in the same period. The largest:

How to read it

Nothing on this list suggests wrongdoing. Founders often hold most of their wealth in one stock and sell steadily to diversify; many sales run on 10b5-1 plans set up months earlier (the "under a plan" column shows the share of sales marked that way). Pay in stock already gives a CEO exposure, so not buying more can be perfectly rational. The list is useful as context: when a company says its shares are undervalued, it is fair to check whether the person saying so has ever bought any.

Examples

From the data: Michael N. Intrator, chief executive of CoreWeave, Inc., sold $846.8M of CRWV stock across 66 sales in our records, 94% of them under a trading plan, and made no open-market purchase. The latest sale was on Sep 30, 2026.

Research background: in "Are Insider Trades Informative?" (Review of Financial Studies, 2001), Josef Lakonishok and Inmoo Lee found that insider purchases predicted future returns, while sales had little predictive power. That asymmetry is why this page treats "never bought" as the notable fact, not the selling itself.

Explain it like I'm 13

Your coach gets paid in team jerseys and sells some on eBay. That's fine; he has bills. But if he keeps telling everyone the jerseys are about to be worth a fortune, and never buys a single one with his own money, you might take his advice with a pinch of salt.

Built from SEC Form 4 and 13F filings and STOCK Act reports as read by WallStPal, rebuilt every day. Prices are weekly closing prices derived from SEC data and can lag by a few weeks. Results describe what stocks did, not anyone's profit, and are not investment advice. See our method.