SanDisk's inside man sold Monday morning. Necip Sayiner moved $870K out, 17% of his position, and he didn't do it on a schedule. Discretionary. By Friday the stock was down 11.5%, the worst performance on this week's board. The timing lands harder when you zoom out: SanDisk became the S&P 500's best performer this year with 45x returns, crushing even NVIDIA. The Motley Fool published two separate pieces on Monday alone calling it "the biggest winner of the AI memory era" and questioning whether it had dethroned Micron. Sayiner read those headlines the same morning he sold. Another VP, Michael Pokorny, dumped $3.5M the same day. The stock sat 14% off its high, technically healthy, trading at 68 times earnings with a 61% net margin. SanDisk filed an 8-K on Thursday. Two insiders don't discretionarily exit the same day by accident when the company has material events pending. Now flip the script. CrowdStrike had eight insiders sell $28.4M this week, every single transaction pre-planned, and the stock climbed 12.6% straight into overbought territory. CEO George Kurtz has been running the same 10b5-1 plan all year, his eleventh sale in twelve months, bringing his total to $19M. The stock trades at negative 812 times earnings with a negative net margin. None of that mattered. The market absorbed $28.4M of scheduled insider selling and added $70 per share. RSI hit 81. The stock sits 2% from its 52-week high. Kurtz's last sale preceded a 20% gain the following week. When a CEO's pre-planned sales keep getting rewarded with double-digit rallies, the 10b5-1 schedule becomes less interesting than the question of whether he renews it when the plan expires. Carvana went the other direction. President Thomas Taira sold $447K on Monday, also pre-planned, and watched the stock drop 13.8% by Friday. He sold at $77.94. By close it was $67.17. His last sale in April was followed by a 15% gain, so the pattern isn't predictive, but the timing this week hurt. The company filed an 8-K on May 6 about officer departures and bylaw amendments. Taira's sale hit four days after that filing. The stock dropped below both moving averages and slid into oversold territory. Carvana beat estimates by 259% last quarter, but the market doesn't care about last quarter when the current one looks this soft. Tech was a $199M exit with zero buying. 49 insiders across 23 companies, all heading out. AMD's EVP Paul Grasby led with $10.8M while the stock fell 7.6%. Lisa Su added $55.7M on Friday at the exact closing price, another 10b5-1 execution. Four Corning executives sold a combined $8.9M while GLW dropped 7.5%. Lumentum insiders moved $18.8M out while LITE fell 4.9%. Western Digital, Texas Instruments, KLA, NVIDIA's supplier ecosystem, the AI trade, the semiconductor complex. All selling. Not one discretionary buy in the entire sector. The 30-day rolling total is even sharper: 130 tech sells totaling $665M against six buys totaling $45K. That's not portfolio rebalancing. That's a unanimous vote. One person walked in with nine figures. Cascade Investment, Bill Gates' vehicle, bought $100.5M of Republic Services on Tuesday. Discretionary. The stock gained 3.1% by Friday. Waste management isn't sexy, but RSG trades at 33 times earnings with an 11% net margin and just beat estimates by 3%. When the most sophisticated capital allocator on earth puts $100M behind garbage trucks while tech insiders flee a $665M rally, the question isn't what Cascade sees in waste. The question is what tech insiders see that Cascade doesn't. Two other buys stand out against the wall of tech selling. TKO Group, the UFC and WWE parent, had three executives buy a combined $4.5M this week. CEO Ariel Emanuel led with $2M, Mark Shapiro matched him, CFO Andrew Schleimer added $500K. All discretionary. The stock gained 5% by Friday. Meanwhile at Jack Henry, CEO Gregory Adelson bought $267K and Treasurer Mimi Carsley added $50K the same day their stock fell 5.2%. They bought into the drop. That's conviction. Republic Services reports in June. NetApp, which saw its EVP sell $235K this week, reports May 28. SanDisk filed that 8-K on Thursday but hasn't announced earnings yet. Tesla, where we've been tracking CFO patterns all quarter, reports in three weeks. The filing tells you what happened Monday. The earnings call tells you whether Monday's insider knew something the rest of us didn't. |