Intel $INTC Gets $9.7M Insider Buy as CEO Bets on the Bottom
When insiders open their personal checkbooks during a selloff, the market tends to listen. Here's what the smart money is doing while everyone else panics.
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While retail investors were doom-scrolling through the worst week for the Nasdaq since March 2020, a few insiders were doing something very different: opening their own wallets. And not in a small way.
$INTC CEO Lip Bu Tan bought $9.7 million worth of Intel shares on the first trading day after the stock cratered 28%, according to Felix Nikolas Prehn's breakdown of recent insider filings. That is not a rounding error. That is a man who looked at the rubble of his own company's stock price and said "yes, more please." Intel has been a punching bag for years as $NVDA ate its lunch in the AI chip race, but Tan's buy signals genuine conviction that the selloff has overshot. The bear case is obvious: Intel is still losing market share and burning cash trying to compete in foundry services. The bull case is equally straightforward: at these levels, almost all the bad news is already priced in, and insider buying at this scale is historically one of the cleaner buy signals you can find.
On the exact same day, MGM Resorts board member and activist investor Keith Meister dropped a staggering $52 million on $MGM shares, one of the largest single insider purchases highlighted in the filing review. MGM has been collateral damage in a market that is punishing anything consumer-facing and cyclical amid Iran war uncertainty and a VIX that spiked 69.66% to 28.18 in a single session. But Meister is not a passive board tourist. Activist investors buying this aggressively tend to have a thesis, and $52 million is a thesis with a capital T.
YouTube sentiment is split in a way that's actually useful here. The Felix Nikolas Prehn video leans bullish on insider signals as a contrarian indicator, while Cramer's Mad Money recap calls this week's bounce a "dead cat" and warns that sellers are still lurking on every rip. Both can be true at the same time. Insider buying tells you where the floor might be. It does not tell you when you get there.
The broader context matters too. The S&P 500 dropped 4.36% on November 5th alone, Berkshire is sitting on $377.4 billion in cash, and 10-year Treasury yields slipped to 4.84% as investors fled to safety. In that environment, putting $9.7 million or $52 million into beaten-down equities is either genius or the financial equivalent of catching a falling safe. The insiders are betting on genius. The market has not agreed yet.
If history is any guide, it will.