Within two business days. By law. Every time a CEO, a founder, or a billion-dollar fund buys their own stock on the open market, it becomes public record. Almost nobody reads it. That's the whole edge.
A fund pushing half a billion dollars into a stock is an elephant climbing into a bathtub. The water has to go somewhere.
It shows up in a filing called a Form 4 — the disclosure the SEC forces on executives, directors, and anyone owning more than 10% of a company, within two business days of every open-market purchase. Names, share counts, the exact price they paid, the exact date.
It's free. It's public. It's searchable. And it is almost entirely ignored, because it arrives as thousands of raw filings a month with no story attached to any of them.
Executives sell for a hundred reasons. They buy for exactly one.
That asymmetry is the most underrated signal in retail investing. A sale can mean a divorce, a tax bill, a new house. A purchase means one thing: the person with the best seat in the building thinks the price is going up — and is willing to be publicly, permanently on record about it.
April – July 2026 · verified Form 4 filings
The Ten Checks That Mattered
Ranked by dollar size. Plotted on a logarithmic scale — a $1B buy is roughly 65× a $15M buy, so a linear axis would flatten the bottom half into slivers.
Every figure is a real open-market purchase reported to the SEC on Form 4 between April and July 2026. Jefferies combines two separate buys by the same filer. Not recommendations — this is simply what was filed.
Every week we pull the buys that actually matter off the tape — who bought, at what price, and what it signals — in plain English. No tips, no hype, no jargon.
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Split those ten checks by who wrote them and the picture flips. Nearly four out of every five dollars came from strategic buyers — companies and banks buying into businesses they already work with — not from the fund managers retail tends to follow.
Share of dollars · ten largest buys
Who Is Actually Writing The Checks
$2.56 billion in total open-market purchases, by buyer type.
Percentages are dollar-weighted across the ten filings above, not a survey of the whole market. A single $1B buy moves this mix a lot — which is exactly why we read the filings one at a time instead of trusting a summary.
The loudest money isn't guessing at a business. It already works with it.
Most insider buys are meaningless — a director topping up a few thousand dollars to satisfy an ownership requirement. These are the three patterns that aren't.
Several insiders buying the same stock, the same week, near the same price. One person can be wrong. A room full of them agreeing is a decision, not a hunch.
The same buyer coming back — and paying more the second time. Adding on strength is the loudest thing a well-informed buyer can do.
The person who built the company buying it back when the market has given up. It doesn't make a stock safe. It makes it worth a second look.
In May, one of Japan's largest banking groups took a nine-figure stake in Jefferies. Then it happened again — bigger than most people's entire position, at a higher average price. Watch the stake build:
Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group · $JEF
One Position, Built In Public
Both purchases are separate Form 4 filings by the same reporting entity. The second buy came at a higher price than much of the first — the defining trait of a repeat buyer.
A big buy is a headline. A big buy repeated is a thesis.
We are not a stock-picking service and we will never tell you what to buy. What we do is read the tape every market day and translate it — the filings, the levels worth watching, and the story behind why the money moved.
You'll get the marquee buys with exact share counts and prices, the clusters worth a second look, and an honest note on what could go wrong with each one. Written like a smart friend explaining it, not a research report.
It's free, it takes about five minutes, and you can leave in one click.
The filings are already public. The only question is whether anyone tells you what they mean.
By subscribing you agree to receive the free Main Street Betz newsletter. This is not investment advice. Unsubscribe anytime in one click.