Insider buying is one of the best indicators of how a stock might perform in the future.
The people running a company or who sit on its board of directors know it best. How could they not? They know things an investor couldn't, like sales figures since the last quarterly report or total intangibles you can't put on a spreadsheet, like office morale.
It was once put very succinctly by investing legend Peter Lynch: "Insiders might sell their shares for any number of reasons, but they buy them for only one: they think the price will rise."
So, if you're worried about an artificial intelligence (AI) bubble and want to know which AI companies are the real deal versus those facing a rude awakening if/when any AI bubble pops, look at what the insiders at AI companies are doing with their money.
And there is one AI company that has seen some rather promising insider activity in recent months.
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A force for sales, a Salesforce if you will
Salesforce (CRM +2.36%) is a fundamentally strong company, but its shares have had a rough go on the market recently. The company is down 30% year to date (as of Feb. 19.
There hasn't been much insider activity recently, only four transactions with two buys and two sells, but what is there is interesting.
First was Harris Parker, the company's co-founder. His sale of $31.6 million in shares in December 2025 may look alarming at first, but that transaction was part of a 10b5-1 plan, which means it was pre-planned and unrelated to Salesforce's performance.
The only other sale (and the only discretionary sale) was from Neelie Kroes, former VP of the European Commission and a longtime Salesforce director. She sold 3,893 shares for a total of $929,276 in January 2026. As I mentioned before, though, sales like that could be for any number of reasons.
NYSE: CRM
Key Data Points
On to the buyers, with two interesting transactions.
The smaller purchase involved Kirk David Blair, a company director. He bought 1,936 shares for a total of $500,722 in mid-December 2025. That's a serious vote of confidence in where Salesforce is headed in its near future.
But the biggest play was from Mason Morfit, another director and the co-chief executive officer and chief investment officer of the investment firm ValueAct Capital with $10 billion in assets under management. Or rather, his firm bought some Salesforce stock.
ValueAct purchased $25 million worth of Salesforce shares on Dec. 5 , showing serious confidence in Salesforce's future.
So, excluding the 10b5-1 sales, which didn't concern Salesforce as a company, there's net insider buying totaling just shy of $24.6 million in the past three months.
With that in mind, I am very interested in Salesforce's fiscal 2026 results, which are due to be released on Feb. 25, and its spring 2026 product release on Feb. 23, 2026, when it plans to introduce new agentic capabilities and an AI-powered Sales Workspace, among other things.
Just because company insiders know more than outside investors about what's going on behind the scenes doesn't mean they're right about everything. High insider buying activity isn't a foolproof indicator. However, combined with Salesforce's fundamental strength, I would recommend giving this one a look.
