Smart Money vs. Insiders: when funds buy and insiders sell

Every quarter, two groups tell you what they think of a stock, on very different clocks. Insiders report each trade on a Form 4 within two business days. Large funds report their holdings on a 13F, 45 days after the quarter ends, so June 30 positions only became public in mid-August. Most of the time the two groups agree, or one of them stays quiet. This quarter we went looking for the stocks where they disagreed.

Four stood out. Notable funds piled into CoreWeave and Seagate in Q2, and since then insiders at both have sold stock outside any pre-set plan while none bought. At Dick's and Boston Scientific it ran the other way: notable funds trimmed, and insiders bought with their own money.

Fund flow: 13F holdings, Q2 2026, about 760 notable funds. Insider trades: Form 4, 90 days to Oct 20, 2026. In Console, each company's Ownership and Insiders reports.

Funds move billions and insiders move millions, so compare the direction of the bars, not their length. CoreWeave is the clearest case, so we start there.

01 · COREWEAVEThe story funds bought, and who sold into it

On August 11, CoreWeave's second-quarter earnings release opened with this line:

"Record Second Quarter Revenue and Revenue Backlog Highlight Unprecedented Demand for CoreWeave Cloud."

Provenance, our classifier engine, tagged that sentence as accelerating demand and saved the filing it came from (an 8-K, the form companies use to report major news). The company had used the same headline in May and similar language in February. Funds had already acted on it. In Q2, while the stock's weekly close ranged from about $82 to $119, 39 notable funds opened new positions.

The headline wasn't the whole record. CoreWeave filed its 10-Q the next day, and Provenance tagged a different set of sentences in it. A month later, a prospectus for a new stock-sale program carried a dilution warning.

• Aug 11 · 8-K▲Demand acceleratingRecord Second Quarter Revenue and Revenue Backlog Highlight Unprecedented Demand for CoreWeave Cloud.
• Aug 12 · 10-Q▼Material weakness(a gap in financial controls)…our Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer concluded that our disclosure controls and procedures were not effective at the reasonable assurance level as of June 30, 2026 due to the material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting…
• Aug 12 · 10-Q▼Net loss reportedWe incurred net losses of $626 million and $290 million for the three months ended June 30, 2026 and 2025, respectively, and we may not achieve or, if achieved, sustain profitability in the future.
• Sep 17 · Prospectus▼Dilution warningThe issuance of shares under the Equity Distribution Agreement and any collared forward sale agreement may be dilutive and there may be future dilution of our Class A common stock.

Provenance classifier tags scoring 0.9 or higher on a 0–1 scale; sentences shortened where marked. In Console, each company's Filings report.

None of it was hidden, but none of it made the headline. Magnetar's sales, below, began the same day the 10-Q was filed.

The day after the results, Magnetar Financial, an early investor that owns more than 10% of the company, started selling. Over three days it sold $478.8M in 75 trades. Magnetar's sales came in the week the stock closed at $105.26, the same week the quarter's fund holdings became public. Eight executives sold another $29.7M outside their plans over the 90 days, for $508.5M in all. Nobody bought.

Form 4, open-market sales outside a 10b5-1 plan, 90 days to Oct 20, 2026. In Console, CoreWeave's Insiders report.

An early investor taking money off the table after a strong run is not the same signal as a CEO selling, and Magnetar's sales dwarf the executives'. But the executives chose the same direction, and not one insider bought.

At CoreWeave the selling was mostly one outside investor. At Seagate it was the people running the company.

02 · SEAGATEThe executives sold

Notable funds bought $11.1B of Seagate in Q2, the most of any stock in this report, and 36 of them opened new positions.

The story in the filings was strong. Seagate's annual report, filed August 4, carried a sentence Provenance's backlog classifier tagged: Growth was led by data center end markets in which we experienced sustained demand for our high capacity nearline drives across global cloud customers… The same report also carried $27 million of restructuring charges, mostly severance.

Since then five insiders have sold outside their plans, the CEO, CFO and CTO among them. How much they sold depends on what you count.

Count every sale and Seagate's insiders sold $379M. More than half of that ran through pre-set trading plans, often scheduled months ahead, which say little about what an insider thinks today. Take those out and $165.8M remains, led by the CEO at $94.9M and the CFO at $47.5M.

One caution: not every manager shared the notable funds' enthusiasm. Across all 13F filers, holders were net sellers of Seagate in Q2, about $2.5B in dollar terms. The notable funds were on one side of a divided trade.

Those are the two stocks where insiders sold into fund buying. The other two run the opposite way, and there the story is less about size than about who did the buying.

03 · DICK'S AND BOSTON SCIENTIFICInsiders bought what funds sold

Notable funds were net sellers of both stocks in Q2, about $260M each. At Dick's, 17 of them exited; at Boston Scientific, 26 did.

Insiders went the other way. At Dick's, seven insiders bought $5.6M and none sold. Two of them, the CFO and the president, made their first open-market purchases in at least five years. At Boston Scientific, the CEO bought $9.0M of stock, 27.6 times the size of the CEO's usual purchase.

The filings around the buy tell a mixed story. The CEO bought on August 3, a week after the company announced a restructuring plan and five days after its quarterly results. On August 26 it disclosed a cybersecurity incident. Provenance tagged all three:

• Jul 27 · 8-K▼Restructuring chargeThe implementation of the 2026 Restructuring Plan is estimated to result in total pre-tax charges of approximately $700 million to $800 million…
• Jul 29 · 8-K▲Trial resultData met all safety and effectiveness endpoints and demonstrated statistical superiority of FARAPULSE PFA over anti-arrhythmic drugs with significantly higher primary effectiveness.
• Aug 26 · 8-K▼CybersecurityUpon detection, the Company activated its incident response protocols and began an investigation with the assistance of third-party cybersecurity experts to assess and to contain the threat.

Provenance classifier tags scoring 0.9 or higher on a 0–1 scale; sentences shortened where marked. In Console, each company's Filings report.

At Dick's, the 10-Q filed September 3 was mixed. Provenance's margin classifier tagged gross margin up 79 basis points, which the company said higher costs more than offset. Its restructuring classifier tagged costs from integrating Foot Locker.

These are small sums next to fund flows. But an open-market buy puts an insider's own money down at the market price, and a first buy in five years is a change in behavior.

04 · WHAT TO MAKE OF ITThe next test is November 16

None of this is a recommendation. A sale outside a plan can pay for a tax bill or a house, and a confident buy doesn't always pay off. What the comparison gives you is timing. By the time fund holdings are public, insiders have had six more weeks to act, and they see the business from the inside.

The next test arrives on Monday, November 16, when third-quarter fund holdings are due. We'll update this report with the new filings and see whether funds followed the insiders or held their ground.

05 · HOW WE COUNTDecisions, not paperwork

Most "insider selling" headlines add everything together. We separate the trades that reflect a decision from those that don't.

• Counted: open-market buys and sales the insider chose to make.
• Shown but not counted: sales under a pre-set trading plan, often scheduled months earlier.
• Left out: option exercises, shares withheld for taxes and stock awards.

We do this for every insider trade filed since 2003, about 11 million of them. The Data Guide covers how that dataset is built.

Fund flow is counted in shares, not dollars. If a stock rises 30% and a fund holds the same shares, its position grows but it bought nothing. We multiply the change in shares by the price, so only real buying and selling shows up. We also screen for mergers, splits and ticker changes, which otherwise look like a fund selling one stock and buying another. More on the 13F dataset.

06 · MEET CONSOLEBuilt from SEC filings

Everything in this report came from Kaleidoscope Console. Console shows the people and money behind a public company: who owns it, who trades it, who funds it and what they filed. Built from SEC filings; filing-level detail in Console.

At its core is Provenance, our classifier engine, which reads SEC filings sentence by sentence. More than 500 classifiers tag events such as a restructuring, a demand warning or a financing. The tags quoted in this report are a few of them. Each tag keeps the sentence, its filing and the filing date. Around that sit the trades and holdings that show who is acting on the news.

For anyone building models, that means labelled, dated sentences instead of a full annual report: a cleaner input for a factor model and far fewer tokens for an LLM. The same data is available in Console, through our API and through our MCP server for AI agents.

This is the first of our quarterly Smart Money vs. Insiders reports. For the weekly read, see last week's filings roundup or all Insights. Want to run this screen on your own names? Request a demo.

Sources: Kaleidoscope 13F consensus (Q2 2026, notable funds), Form 4 insider trades and weekly closing prices, data as of October 20, 2026.