PayPal: 42 insider sales, one purchase, one checkbox
One company, three sets of filings, read against each other: what PayPal's Form 4s, its statements and its 13F holders each say, and why they do not agree.
Dan Mercer7 min read
PayPal's executives filed 42 open-market sales and a single open-market purchase between 30 October 2025 and 3 September 2026. Over roughly the same stretch the company's own statements went the other way, with revenue reaching $33.17B in 2025 and the operating margin finishing higher than it was in 2021. This is what happens when you read all three filings on one company instead of the one that makes a headline.
In this post
Reading one filing well is the easy case. The hard case, and the ordinary one, is two filings about the same company that do not agree, which is where a reader usually gives up and reads a headline instead.
PayPal is the clearest live example I have found. Its executives have been filing sales almost to the exclusion of purchases. Its income statement has gone the other way for four years. And the fund managers this platform follows have been swapping places rather than leaving. All three are public, all three are free to read, and they were filed by people who know more about the company than I do.
What the Form 4s say
A Form 4 is filed within two business days of an insider trading their own company’s stock, which makes insider transactions the fastest of the three documents here by a wide margin. PayPal’s tab carries 175 of them.
Of those, 42 are open-market sales and exactly one is an open-market purchase. The rest are awards, option exercises and shares withheld to cover tax on vesting, which are movements rather than decisions and are not collapsed into the count.
The count, and immediately underneath it the thing that complicates the count. If the post stopped here it would have a clean story and a wrong one.
The read: Worth watching
42 open-market sales and one open-market purchase, filed between 30 October 2025 and 3 September 2026.
That is the count, and it is the most lopsided ratio I have seen on a company this size. It is also the number that step two spends its whole length qualifying, so it is worth holding loosely for one more screen.
What the 10b5-1 box changes
Since 2023 a Form 4 carries a checkbox saying whether the trade ran under a Rule 10b5-1 plan: an instruction set up in advance, at a time when the insider was allowed to trade, which then executes on a schedule. A sale under one is a calendar entry. A sale outside one was decided in the week it happened.
The box is why “42 sales” is a weaker fact than it sounds. Twenty-one of the filings, carrying $6.69M, were on a plan. Three filings carrying $1.57M were not. None of them is unlabelled, which is unusual and means nothing has to be guessed at here.
Per person, the shape is more interesting than the total. The only insider whose selling was entirely discretionary is the Chief Risk Officer, at $615K, and his holding fell 20.64% over the year. The largest seller by value, the President of Global Markets, sold $4.41M of which $3.55M ran on a plan.
Two rows here are the opposite of what the headline count implies. See the bottom two. The bottom two rows are the ones I did not expect. The Chief Financial Officer sold nothing on the open market over the twelve months and her holding still fell 7.38%, because shares left it by a route that is not a sale. The Chief Accounting Officer sold $440K and finished the year with 74.67% more stock than he started it with, because he was granted more than he sold.
So “insiders are selling” and “insiders own less” are not the same sentence, and on this company they point in different directions for two of the six people.
The read: Both
Of the 42 sales, 21 filings worth $6.69M ran under a prearranged plan and three filings worth $1.57M were discretionary.
A plan sale was decided months before the week it executed, so it carries almost nothing about what the seller thinks now. The discretionary figure is the one worth reading, and it is a quarter of the size.
What the statements say
The insider tab covers about eleven months. The statements go back to 2013, and the part worth reading starts in 2021.
- Revenue rose every year: $25.37B in 2021, $27.52B in 2022, $33.17B in 2025. The growth rate slowed, from 18.26% to 4.32%, and it never went negative.
- Operating margin fell from 16.80% in 2021 to 13.94% in 2022, then recovered: 16.89%, 16.75%, and 18.28% in 2025. That last figure is above where it started.
- Diluted EPS went $3.52, $2.09, $3.84, $3.99, $5.41. The 2022 trough and the recovery are both visible, and the 2025 figure is the highest on file.
The year table at the foot is the gated part. The 2022 dip and the recovery either side of it are the whole shape. The share count is falling, which the panel labels rather than leaves to be inferred: 968M diluted shares in 2025, down from a peak earlier in the series. A falling count is buybacks, and it is why EPS has risen faster than net income has.
Operating cash flow, which is the figure the Piotroski score on this tab leans on hardest. The same tab scores PayPal 8 of 8 on the answerable Piotroski checks, a published 2000 method applied to the company’s own filed figures. It is a third party’s scoring rule rather than this product’s opinion, and one of the nine checks could not be answered because a figure it needs is missing from a filing.
The read: Reassuring
PayPal's revenue rose from $25.37B in 2021 to $33.17B in 2025, and its operating margin finished higher than it started.
The margin fell to 13.94% in 2022 and was back to 18.28% by 2025, against 16.80% in 2021. On its own filed figures the business did not deteriorate over the stretch the Form 4s cover.
What the 13F filings say
The third document is the slowest. A 13F reports what a manager held on the last day of a quarter and is published up to 45 days later, which is why the panel prints the age of the data before it prints any of the data.
I expected this list to be emptying, because several managers did leave PayPal across 2025 and 2026. What the Q2 2026 filings show instead is a swap: Nick Train cut a quarter of a position that is still 5.19% of his book, while David Einhorn opened a new one and Joel Greenblatt added to his.
Two position sizes are locked here. The direction of every move is free, which is the part this step needs. A 13F will not tell you why any of that happened, and it is worth being precise about how little it carries: no purchase price, no short positions, nothing listed outside the US, and nothing opened and closed inside one quarter. I wrote a longer walkthrough of what a 13F leaves out on Berkshire’s filing, and every limitation in it applies here.
The read: Both
Six tracked managers held PayPal at the end of Q2 2026, and the list turned over rather than emptied.
Nick Train trimmed 24.33%, Yacktman added, Joel Greenblatt added and David Einhorn opened a new position. A 13F is up to 45 days old, so every one of these may have changed since.
So which one is right?
I set out to find which document was the reliable one, and the honest answer is that the question is badly formed. Each form is a record of a different thing, and the reason a reader wants (what do the people closest to this company actually think) is in none of them.
What the forms do support is narrowing. The 42 sales become three discretionary filings worth $1.57M once the 10b5-1 box is read, and $615K of that is one person. The single purchase stays a single purchase. The statements stay improved. That is a much smaller and much less exciting disagreement than the one the raw counts describe, and it is the one that is actually on file.
Every row carries its own plan label, which is what lets the count be narrowed rather than argued about. The dates are the last thing worth holding on to. The Form 4s run to 3 September 2026, the newest 13F describes 30 June 2026 and the statements describe fiscal years. Three documents about one company, none of them describing the same week.
The read: Not a signal
None of the three documents contains the thing that would settle it, and that is a property of the forms rather than a gap in the reading.
A Form 4 records a trade and never a reason. A 13F records a position and never a reason. A 10-K records the business and says nothing about what the people running it believe. The disagreement is real and the filings cannot resolve it.
The three tabs this post used are the insider transactions, the filed statements and the holder list on the company overview, and the managers themselves are on the investor pages.
Questions
- What is a Form 4 filing?
- A report filed with the SEC within two business days of a company insider trading their own company's stock. It names the person, their role, the transaction code, the number of shares, the price where one applies and the holding left afterwards.
- What does Rule 10b5-1 mean on an insider filing?
- It means the trade ran under a plan set up in advance, at a time the insider was permitted to trade, which then executed on a schedule. Since 2023 the Form 4 carries a checkbox saying so, which separates a sale decided months earlier from one decided that week.
- How many PayPal insiders have been selling?
- Five executives filed the 42 open-market sales on file between 30 October 2025 and 3 September 2026, and one person filed the single open-market purchase. Twenty-one of the sale filings ran under a Rule 10b5-1 plan.
- Does insider selling mean a company is in trouble?
- Not on its own. An executive is paid in stock and sells it for reasons a Form 4 does not record, and a sale under a Rule 10b5-1 plan was scheduled before the week it executed. The form records the trade and never the reason.
- Is any of this investment advice?
- No. Everything here describes what PayPal and its insiders and holders filed, and the post deliberately stops short of any view on the company.
Sources
Every figure above was read off the product, and comes from the documents below. Where a figure is not in a filing, the post says so rather than estimating one.
Nothing here is investment advice, and the post makes no forecast about any company or fund it names.
Written by
Dan Mercer
Founder and writer, Investailor
- Builds Investailor, a research desk that reads SEC filings, 13F holdings reports, Form 4 insider transactions and ETF holdings files, and traces every figure it shows back to the document it came from.
- Writes each post by working through the real filing in public: every number in a walkthrough is read off a page the reader can open, and the primary documents are linked at the foot of the post.
- Publishes the method rather than the conclusion. These posts say what a filing records, what it leaves out, and where the evidence stops, and they carry no price targets, ratings or forecasts.
Read all three filings on a company you actually follow
See the 10b5-1 split on any company
The discretionary and planned breakdown this post used to narrow 42 sales down to three filings, on every company with Forms 4 on file. Free, and no account needed to read it.
Read the filed year table, not just the shape
The 2013 to 2025 revenue, operating margin and diluted EPS figures behind step three, as PayPal filed them, rather than the unscaled panels a signed-out reader sees.
Every filed yearMeasure
See every holder's position size
The two position sizes step four left locked, and the complete roster behind any company's tracked investor list rather than the largest few.
The whole holder listMeasure
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