There’s an old saying on Wall Street: insiders sell for a hundred reasons, but they only buy for one.
A bonus needs diversifying? Sell. A divorce settlement? Sell. Taxes due, vacation house, new Ferrari? Sell, sell, sell. But writing a personal check to buy shares in your own company — especially when the stock is bleeding — means you genuinely believe the price is wrong. And right now, some very senior people are doing exactly that.
Every time a company executive or board director buys or sells their own stock, they’re legally required to file a Form 4 with the SEC within two business days. These filings are public, free, and almost completely ignored by casual investors. That’s where the edge is.
March 2026 has been unusually loud on this front. Here are the three moves worth knowing about.
$TTD — The CEO Put $148 Million of His Own Money In
This one went viral, and for good reason.
Between March 2 and March 4, The Trade Desk co-founder and CEO Jeff Green purchased 6 million shares of $TTD at prices ranging from roughly $23 to $25 per share. Total bill: approximately $148 million. Out of his own pocket.
To appreciate why that’s jaw-dropping, you need the backstory. The Trade Desk runs the world’s largest independent demand-side platform — the tech layer that lets advertisers buy digital ads across video, audio, connected TV, and mobile without going through Google or Meta’s walled gardens. For years, it was a Wall Street darling. Then in early 2025, $TTD reported its first revenue miss in over eight years, Green issued a public apology to investors, and the stock entered a slow-motion collapse. By the time he started buying, shares had fallen roughly 73% from their 52-week high of $89.76.
That’s when he went in for $148 million.
The market noticed immediately. $TTD jumped over 18% the morning the filing hit, erasing weeks of losses in a single session. Adding fuel: reports emerged that The Trade Desk is in early discussions with OpenAI to manage advertising for its platforms — a potential game-changer for an ad-tech company still building its AI story.
The question investors are wrestling with: is this a founder backing himself at a generational low, or is it a desperate attempt to prop up a stock with a structural problem? Green himself published an explanation via his company’s editorial platform, calling it “the biggest purchase of his life” and dismissing what he called Wall Street’s “software is dead” narrative.
At 12x projected 2027 EPS, the valuation is undeniably cheap for a high-quality platform company. But $TTD still needs to reverse slowing revenue growth to justify anything above that. The CEO is betting it will. You now know what he paid.
$CPNG — A Board Director Just Dropped $136M While Everyone Was Distracted by Bad Headlines
Coupang doesn’t get nearly enough airtime in Western finance media, which is part of what makes this so interesting.
$CPNG is essentially the Amazon of South Korea — same-day delivery, a subscription loyalty program, restaurant delivery, video streaming, even fintech. Revenue hit $34.5 billion in 2025, up 14% year-on-year. But the stock had been getting crushed. A major data breach in November 2025 exposed the personal data of over 33 million customers, triggering Korean regulatory scrutiny and an estimated $1.2 billion in remediation costs for 2026. Shares slid from a 52-week high of $34 down to the high-$18s.
Right in the middle of that mess, board director Neil Mehta — managing partner at growth equity firm Greenoaks Capital — bought 7.35 million shares across three days, spending $136.5 million at prices between $18.22 and $19.01. He didn’t nibble. He didn’t test the waters. He deployed nine figures while the headlines were still screaming about the breach.
The stock responded with a 10.8% surge once the filing became public.
What makes Mehta’s buy interesting beyond the size is the context. This is someone who already had an enormous indirect stake in $CPNG through Greenoaks funds — over 55 million shares after the purchase. Adding $136M more isn’t diversification, it’s doubling down with conviction. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have since raised their price targets to the $35–$40 range, suggesting the analyst community is catching up to where insiders were three weeks ago.
The risk is real — thin margins in e-commerce, ongoing regulatory pressure in Korea, and the breach’s reputational tail could linger longer than expected. But when a seasoned growth investor treats a data-breach selloff as a buying window, it’s worth understanding why.
$FIS — A Quiet $1M Buy That’s Easy to Miss
Not every insider signal needs nine figures to be meaningful.
On March 5, Fidelity National Information Services CEO Stephanie Ferris bought 19,846 shares of $FIS at a weighted average price of $50.39 — roughly $1 million out of pocket. The stock at that point was down about 24% year-to-date and sitting near multi-year lows.
$FIS isn’t flashy. It’s the financial technology plumbing behind banks, credit unions, and capital markets globally — think core banking systems, payment processing, and balance sheet management software. Not the kind of thing that trends on Reddit. But it’s the kind of company that quietly processes trillions of dollars in transactions and has deep, hard-to-replace relationships with financial institutions worldwide.
What makes Ferris’s buy notable isn’t the headline number — it’s the pattern. Three insiders at $FIS have made open-market purchases in the last six months, with only one sale. That consistent accumulation, with zero panic selling from the inside, is a different kind of signal than a single splashy transaction. It says: the people running this company don’t think the selloff reflects reality.
$FIS also recently won a contract with Mizuho Financial Group to provide balance sheet automation and regulatory support — a win in exactly the high-value, regulation-heavy banking workflow that Ferris has been publicly positioning the company toward. The stock is down over 60% from its five-year high. The CEO just put her own money in at these prices.
What All Three Moves Have in Common
The through-line here isn’t sector or size — it’s the “buy the dip the analysts created” pattern. All three of these stocks had been hit by a combination of disappointing guidance, bad headlines, or macro pressure. Analysts trimmed targets. Retail investors rotated out. And then the insiders stepped in.
That’s not a coincidence. Insiders can’t trade on material non-public information — that’s illegal, and the SEC watches Form 4 filings closely. What they can do is form an informed opinion that the market is overreacting to short-term noise when they know the long-term fundamentals are intact. That’s exactly what these filings suggest.
None of this is a green light to blindly follow insiders into any of these positions — $TTD still needs to prove it can grow revenue again, $CPNG still faces real execution risk, and $FIS is a slow-moving turnaround play at best. But as a signal that smart, well-informed people think the floor is in? It’s one of the cleaner data points you can get in markets.
You can track every Form 4 filing as it happens for free at SEC EDGAR or OpenInsider. The filings are dry and a little ugly, but now you know what to look for.
