Insider Buying Trends by Sector: Where Executives Are Putting Their Money
Analysis of insider buying patterns across market sectors. Find out which industries see the most executive confidence and what it means for investors.
If you only look at insider trades one company at a time, it’s easy to miss the bigger picture.
A bank CEO buys a million dollars of stock and you think, “Bullish.” A biotech founder buys a few hundred thousand before a trial readout and you think, “They must know something.” A tech executive never buys at all and you start wondering whether they secretly hate their own company.
What’s missing in all of those reactions is sector context. Some industries are full of executives who buy their own stock routinely. Others almost never see open‑market insider buying, even when the companies are doing well. The same Form 4 can mean very different things depending on the corner of the market it appears in.
This guide zooms out and asks a different question: where, across the market, are insiders actually putting their own money to work—and why does that pattern look the way it does?
Where Insider Buying Really Happens
If you line up insider buying by sector and only count true open‑market purchases (the P‑code trades where someone actually chose to buy shares), a few groups dominate.
Financials: Banks and the Culture of “Skin in the Game”
Financial companies—banks, insurers, asset managers—almost always sit near the top of any insider‑buying leaderboard.
That’s partly cultural. Bank CEOs are expected to have meaningful personal stakes in their own stock. It’s something boards, regulators, and investors all watch. When a bank runs into turbulence, one of the first questions on a TV hit is, “Is management buying here?” Executives know that, and many lean into it during tough periods.
It’s also structural. Financials are volatile in ways that lend themselves to opportunistic buying. A regulatory scare, a yield‑curve move, or a single credit headline can knock a bank stock down 30% in a week without changing the long‑term earnings power much. Insiders who believe they know the balance sheet better than the market will happily buy into those air pockets.
You see the pattern most clearly during sector panics. In banking crises—regional flare‑ups, stress around specific loan books—Form 4 feeds fill up with familiar names: CEOs, CFOs, and directors all stepping in to signal, “We’re not going down with this ship.”
Energy: Volatility, Cycles, and Generational Conviction
Energy is another heavy contributor to insider buying, especially in oil and gas.
Here, the underlying commodity sets the rhythm. When oil prices collapse, equity prices follow, sometimes to levels that insiders see as completely disconnected from what the company’s assets are actually worth. If you grew up in the industry, have lived through multiple cycles, and believe deeply in the long‑term need for your product, a 50% drawdown feels less like a warning and more like a sale.
Many energy executives and board members also have multi‑generational ties to the business. Their networks, reputations, and often their family wealth are wrapped up in their companies. When they buy stock after a commodity slump, they’re not just making a punt; they’re expressing a view on the whole cycle.
The most interesting periods are the ugly ones: oil crashes, geopolitical shocks, environmental overhangs. That’s when you see clusters of purchases from people who have seen this movie before.
Healthcare and Biotech: Spiky, Event‑Driven Buying
Healthcare is a tale of two worlds. Big, diversified pharma behaves one way; early‑stage biotech another.
Biotech executives live and die by binary events: trial readouts, FDA decisions, partnership deals. The stock can double or halve on a single press release. Because of that, insider buying in the space tends to be sporadic but intense. You might see nothing for months and then a sudden burst of purchases ahead of a key catalyst or immediately after the stock is punished for a setback that insiders believe is survivable.
Founders often feature prominently here. Many come from scientific backgrounds, not Wall Street, and think in terms of “this drug works” or “this mechanism makes sense” rather than quarterly guidance. When they buy, it’s often because they believe their science is being mispriced, not because a model says the multiple should mean‑revert.
The signal is noisy—there are plenty of biotech insiders who are simply too optimistic about their own molecules—but in aggregate, the sector generates some of the most dramatic examples of “we’re betting on ourselves” activity in the market.
Industrials and Old‑School Manufacturing: Quiet, Consistent Accumulation
Traditional industrials and manufacturers don’t make headlines for insider buying the way banks and biotechs do, but if you look at the data, you’ll see a steady trickle of purchases.
These are often companies with long histories, family involvement, or cultures where management has grown up inside the organization over decades. The people running them know the order book, the customer relationships, and the plant utilization numbers in their sleep. When the economic cycle turns down and the market dumps anything vaguely cyclical, these insiders sometimes buy into the gloom.
You don’t always see dramatic spikes; instead, you see counter‑cyclical nibbling—more buying when purchasing managers’ indices roll over, fewer when everything looks rosy. It’s less “heroic bet” and more “putting some extra chips down when the table is quiet.”
Where Insider Buying Is Rare (And Therefore Interesting)
On the other side, there are sectors where open‑market insider buying is an unusual event.
Large‑Cap Tech: Equity‑Rich, Cash‑Cautious
At first glance, this is odd. Big technology companies have minted immense fortunes for their founders and executives. But very little of that wealth is created through buying stock in the open market. It comes from grants, options, and early‑stage ownership.
By the time a tech company is large and public, its senior team already sits on huge equity stakes. They’re more likely to be thinking about diversification—how to reduce exposure—than about adding even more of the same name. Pay packages are heavily skewed toward stock, so the idea of writing a separate personal check to buy more can feel redundant.
Layer on top the fact that many of these names trade at lofty valuations during good times, and it becomes psychologically harder to hit the buy button. You do see buying after brutal sector‑wide corrections, when years of gains are wiped out in months. But in calm periods, insider activity in mega‑cap tech is often a thin trickle of routine sales, not confident purchases.
That’s why any genuine open‑market buying in this space tends to stand out. It doesn’t happen often, so when it does, people notice.
Consumer Discretionary: Trend Risk and Choppy Tenure
Consumer discretionary companies—retailers, travel, restaurants, “wants” rather than “needs”—sit somewhere in the middle, but closer to the low‑buying camp.
These businesses are at the mercy of fickle consumer tastes and macro conditions. Executives change frequently as brands pivot, reposition, or get sold. Pay structures in this world tend to mix cash and stock in ways that aren’t always geared around long‑term ownership. The culture, particularly in fashion and retail, is less “we own this for life” and more “we hit our numbers this season.”
Insider buying does happen, particularly in turnaround stories or activist situations where new management teams want to signal alignment. But as a background pattern, it’s less persistent than in banks or energy.
Utilities and Staples: Quiet by Design
Regulated utilities and classic consumer staples (think big food and household product companies) are usually at the bottom of the insider‑buying charts.
There’s a structural reason for this: the upside is deliberately limited. Utilities are designed to earn regulated returns. Staples sell steady volumes in mature categories. Investors in these sectors often care more about dividends and stability than about growth. Insiders are no different. They own stock, but they’re not waking up thinking, “This thing will triple from here.”
When executives in these sectors do buy meaningful amounts in the open market, it’s memorable precisely because it’s rare. A single Form 4 for a utility CEO can carry as much narrative weight as a dozen small buys from bank directors.
Why Sectors Behave So Differently
The surface explanation is “different industries, different norms.” Underneath that, a few concrete forces shape insider behavior.
How People Get Paid
Compensation structures vary wildly between sectors. In some industries, executives are paid relatively modest salaries and expected to build wealth through stock ownership over long tenures. In others, the packages are heavy on stock‑based pay from day one, with refreshers that keep rolling even if nobody ever buys on the open market.
If you’re a bank CEO who climbed the ranks internally, you may have accumulated stock gradually and still feel the need to demonstrate commitment by buying more in tough times. If you’re a Silicon Valley executive hired from outside with a front‑loaded equity grant worth tens of millions, adding an extra $200k of shares with personal cash may feel symbolic at best.
Volatility and Opportunity
Some sectors simply swing more.
When your stock regularly swings 30–50% on macro headlines, commodity shocks, or trial results, you get a lot more moments where insiders look at the tape and think, “This is stupid; I know the business better than this.”
In a stable, slow‑moving sector, there just aren’t as many of those opportunities. Prices are less likely to get wildly disconnected from fundamentals in either direction, and the payoff for trying to time small dips is lower.
Valuation Levels
Insiders live in the same world of multiples you do.
If an industry tends to trade at low P/E or EV/EBITDA ratios—financials and traditional energy often do—there’s a psychological sense that buying at those levels is reasonable, especially on further dips. In hot growth sectors that regularly trade at nosebleed valuations, the hurdle to decide “this is cheap enough for me to add with my own money” is higher.
It isn’t that insiders are running DCFs every night; it’s that “this is already expensive” or “this has been crushed relative to where it usually trades” colors their instincts like anyone else’s.
Culture and Expectations
Every industry has its own unwritten rules.
In banking, owning your own stock is part of the job description. In some industrial or family‑influenced businesses, management is expected to have real skin in the game as a matter of pride. In big‑tech land, the expectation is more “don’t rock the boat, don’t do anything weird around quiet periods, let your grants do the work.”
Those cultural norms show up in Form 4 data, even if nobody ever writes them down.
When Insiders Choose to Buy: Timing Patterns
Sector differences aren’t just about who buys, but also when they buy.
Around Earnings Windows
Executives are typically barred from trading for a couple of weeks before quarterly results and for a short period afterward. Those blackout windows create natural rhythms.
You often see little blips of buying just after earnings—once the numbers are out, the blackout lifts, and insiders who’ve been itching to act finally get a chance. If a stock has just been punished for a miss that management thinks is fixable, that post‑earnings window can be especially busy in volatile sectors.
During Sector Crises
The most dramatic activity tends to cluster around sector‑wide stress.
In banking panics, you see regional bank CEOs and directors stepping up to buy as their stocks gap down day after day. During oil crashes, energy insiders add exposure at prices they believe will look silly once the cycle turns. In 2022’s tech correction, one of the more striking features was how little open‑market buying had happened in large‑cap tech before that point—and how the first meaningful purchases started to appear only after substantial damage had already been done.
In each case, the pattern isn’t random. People who live and breathe a sector begin to see the market’s fear as excessive and act accordingly.
Around the Calendar
There are more mundane seasonal effects as well: year‑end tax planning, post‑bonus buying, and the rhythm of 10b5‑1 plans being set up or refreshed. December and January often show slightly elevated activity for reasons that have as much to do with personal finance as with business outlook.
These moves can still be interesting, especially when they line up with other signals, but you don’t want to read a grand macro narrative into every December Form 4.
How “Strong” Looks Different from Sector to Sector
Because sectors have such different baselines, the same kind of trade can have very different weight.
A bank CEO buying a million dollars of stock is noteworthy, but it sits in a context where seven‑figure bank trades are not uncommon, especially in rough markets. You’d still give extra credit if other executives joined in, or if the timing lined up with particularly scary headlines, but the mere fact of the purchase isn’t shocking.
In energy, a wave of insider buying when crude is in the gutter—after a big price collapse, not after a rally—is often taken as a classic contrarian tell. The logic is, “These people have lived through enough cycles to know when things are being marked down too far.”
In biotech, a founder buying stock ahead of a major FDA decision will always draw attention, but the question becomes: are they leaning into conviction, or just refusing to accept that the odds are worse than they think? A CEO buying after a disappointing trial, when the stock has already cratered, can sometimes be an even stronger statement: “We think the market is overreacting to this setback.”
In large‑cap tech, where open‑market buying is rare, almost any true purchase by senior leaders feels like news. It’s the absence of a pattern that makes a single act stand out.
The common thread is that you’re always comparing the trade to what’s normal for that sector and that company, not just reacting to the dollar amount.
Putting Sector Context to Work
So what do you actually do with all this?
When a new Form 4 pops up, the questions get a little richer once you’ve internalized sector norms.
You start by asking, “Is this kind of buying common where this company lives?” A financial or energy name with regular insider accumulation is behaving on script. A sleepy utility with a sudden first‑ever CEO purchase is not.
You then look at how the trade sits relative to recent sector activity. Are lots of regional banks seeing insider buying at the same time after a macro scare? Does a single industrial stand out as an outlier in an otherwise quiet space? Are tech executives starting to buy across multiple companies after a brutal drawdown, when they were silent on the way up?
You also consider the setup: is this happening during a sector panic, after a big move in rates or commodities, or in the middle of a tranquil period when nothing obvious has changed? Sector‑wide cluster buying after a scare feels very different from a gentle uptick in routine purchases during calm markets.
Seen this way, insider data stops being a random stream of names and numbers and becomes one more way to take the market’s temperature at a sector level.
Building a Simple Sector‑Level Insider Watchlist
You don’t need to track every company in every industry to make this useful. Picking a few sectors where insider behavior is especially informative and watching them regularly is enough.
Financials, energy, small‑cap healthcare, and classic cyclicals are natural candidates. That’s where the combination of volatility, valuation swings, and culture gives insiders plenty of reasons to act.
In practice, that might mean:
- Creating sector‑focused watchlists in a tool like Earnings Feed—one for banks, one for energy, one for small‑cap biotech, one for industrials.
- Using the insider filings view to see, at a glance, where open‑market buying is picking up or drying up in each group.
- Jotting down the most interesting episodes—“regional bank CEOs buying in April,” “E&Ps buying at sub‑$60 oil,” “biotech founders adding after failed trials”—and pairing those with subsequent price and fundamental outcomes.
Over time, you build your own sense of which signals are worth following and which ones are just background noise in each corner of the market.
The Short Version
Insider buying is not evenly distributed across the market. Financials and energy live with it. Biotech and some industrials show spiky but meaningful patterns. Large‑cap tech, utilities, and staples barely register most of the time.
A bank CEO buying stock might be reassuring, but it’s not unusual. A tech CEO doing the same thing can be a real event. A utility CEO buying anything at all is a conversation starter.
Once you understand those norms, you stop treating every Form 4 the same way. You start asking “Is this normal here?” before you decide how much weight to give it.
If you want to systematically track where insiders are actually leaning in:
- Create a free Earnings Feed account
- Build a few sector watchlists
- Use the insider feed to see which industries are attracting insider money right now
The filings are public anyway. Sector context is what turns them from trivia into tools.