2015 List of Insiders Who Sold the Most Stock

Over the past year, we’ve tracked the amount of money company insiders have made from stock sales as disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission using the Form 4. Following is our ranking for the top sellers, compiled by totaling the top 200 insider sales for the year, and then separating out institutional investors, leaving only people named on the Form 4 as the “reporting person.”

Sqoop collects SEC data throughout the year, making it immediately available to journalists as a source for news tips. We published similar lists back in July representing data from the first half of the year. Our year-end lists include data from January 1st through December 5th of this year.

Bill Gates again tops our list, selling a whopping $1.5 billion of stock in the company he cofounded almost four decades ago. He’s followed by Google’s cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page who each sold more than $800 million of Google stock this year. Notably Facebook cofounder Jan Koum is new to our list from earlier this year, selling $560 million. Notably absent is the only woman on our insider’s list from the first half of the year, Oracle’s Safra Catz who sold almost $160 million then.

Some observations:

• Fully half of the list is made up from executives and founders from technology companies, including the first five positions held by Microsoft, Google (twice), Facebook and Amazon.

• Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page take up four positions on our Top 20 list, by selling shares not only in Google, but also in Alphabet, which Google acquired back in October, bringing their respective Form 4 sales for the year to north of 1.1 billion each.

• Of the top 20 company insiders, 17 are founders or cofounders, and only three aren’t, including Carnival’s Mickey Arison, Family Dollar Store’s Howard Levine (son of the founder) and CBS’s Les Moonves.

• New to the list from the first half of the year are Jan Koum from Facebook, Robert Cashill from Investors Bancorp and John Martin from Gilead Sciences.

• The company insiders are all men, and only four of the 64 other insiders are women.

• Given the tech focus of the company insiders list, the other insiders and investors list is far more balanced with Oklahoma City-based Paycom dominating, and a smattering of others further down the list.

• Although we haven’t added up all the sales for Wall Street insiders, the top positions are held by Goldman Sachs, Thomas H. Lee Partners, Madison Dearborn Partners, and hedge fund MHR Fund Management.

Top 20 Company Insiders

Other Insiders and Investors