Cabot's '3 Stocks Behind $11.3 Million Insider Buying' — Cardinal, Fiserv, and Energy Fuels Revealed

The Hook

Michael Brush spent years as a financial journalist before launching Cabot Insider Edge earlier this summer, and his first teaser pitch leans on one of the oldest, most defensible ideas in the newsletter business: follow the insiders. The pitch is straightforward. “I Just Found the 3 Stocks Behind $11.3 Million in Insider Buying,” the subject line reads, and the copy argues that the people running these companies are “putting millions of dollars of their own money on the line.” The urgency mechanism is soft, a seasonal nudge rather than a hard catalyst: “all three could be poised for substantial gains as we head into September.”

There is no countdown clock here, no single event date. Just a thesis: when a cluster of executives buys their own beaten-down stock with their own money, that is information worth paying attention to. It is a reasonable place to start, and it is also a pitch that has been made many, many times before. What makes this one worth a closer look is the three names underneath it.

The Big Claim

The specific claim is that insider buying is a signal of outperformance, and that three stocks in particular are flashing it right now. The promo teases them one at a time, each tied to a dollar figure:

• Insider Stock #1: an infrastructure construction company, down nearly 50% from its June high after a disappointing earnings report, where insiders bought about $8.1 million worth of shares.
• Insider Stock #2: a fintech turnaround with roughly 85% recurring revenue, down 62% over the past year, with a $2.2 million cluster of insider buying.
• Insider Stock #3: a uranium and rare earths play where the CEO personally bought about $1 million.

Add those up and you get the $11.3 million in the headline. Stock Gumshoe identified all three, and there is no mystery left to reveal: Cardinal Infrastructure (CDNL), Fiserv (FISV), and Energy Fuels (UUUU).

The Mechanism

Let us walk through each pick the way the promo does, and then look at what is underneath.

Cardinal Infrastructure (CDNL) is the freshest and most interesting of the three. The company went public in December 2025 at $21 a share, as a vertically integrated rollup of construction-services businesses across the Southeast. The story that excited investors was the Sterling Infrastructure comparison: a regional builder that rode the data-center buildout to a monster run. Cardinal has real revenue growth, a lot of it acquisition-fueled, and it raised about $320 million at $73 a share to keep buying.

Then the mood changed. The six-month insider lockup expired, the company sold shares to fund growth, and an August 11 quarter delivered revenue above expectations but earnings well below, with worse margins than analysts wanted. The stock slid from the $90s into the $30s. That is where the insider buying came in: more than $9 million over a few weeks, including roughly $3 million from the CEO against a $450,000 salary. That is a meaningful, coordinated vote of confidence, and it is the kind of buy that the academic research on insider activity actually cares about: a chief executive buying at market prices, with his own money, at a meaningful size. We take a deeper look at Cardinal’s dual-class structure and share-funded acquisition model here.

The catch is the structure. Cardinal has a dual-class setup, so the founder and his family own almost all of the roughly 27.5 million non-traded Class B shares on top of the roughly 20 million Class A shares that trade. Consolidated net income was about $37 million, but only $18 million of that is attributable to common shareholders. The company also funds its acquisitions with shares, so the headline share count understates how much dilution is already built into the story.

Fiserv (FISV) is the big, established name of the three. It is a banking-technology and payments giant, best known for the Clover point-of-sale business, with roughly 80% of revenue recurring. The stock has been through a brutal derating: it once traded above 4X sales and now sits under 2X, at about 7X forward earnings, after growth stalled following the First Data merger and Clover lost momentum to competitors like Toast and Square. A new CEO arrived in June, and a cluster of insiders bought about $2.2 million worth. The bull case is simple: a hated, cheap, recurring-revenue compounder with fresh leadership and insiders betting on themselves. The bear case is equally simple: the earnings are shrinking, not growing, and a 7X multiple can keep falling if the decline continues. We covered the full Fiserv turnaround case separately, including how Clover fits the revenue mix.

Energy Fuels (UUUU) is the thematic play. It is a uranium producer whose most unique asset is the White Mesa Mill, the only legacy uranium processing facility left in the United States, sitting about a mile from what was the Bears Ears National Monument border. The Trump administration’s decision to shrink the monument is seen as good news for the company, and the CEO made his biggest-ever insider purchase, about $1 million, earlier this summer. On top of uranium, Energy Fuels is assembling a “mine to magnet” rare earths strategy, acquiring a German magnet maker called Vacuumschmelze for about $2 billion and Australian Strategic Materials for $300 million. For the uranium and rare-earths thesis behind this pick, we broke down both sides of the story.

The Real Pick

Prices are the August 31, 2026 close from Polygon. Market caps are roughly $3.9 billion for Energy Fuels, $28.3 billion for Fiserv, and about $755 million for Cardinal’s Class A shares, which excludes the untraded Class B. The tease prices come from Stock Gumshoe’s Teaser Summary table. The promo is brand new, detected the day it was published, so all three “since tease” moves are within a few percent. That is exactly what you would expect: there is no track record to grade yet.

Does the Math Check Out?

The headline number holds up arithmetically. $8.1 million plus $2.2 million plus $1 million is $11.3 million, and Stock Gumshoe actually found that Cardinal’s figure is more than $9 million, so the pitch is, if anything, understated.

The harder question is whether the underlying premise, that insider buying translates into “substantial gains,” is as strong as the framing suggests. The academic literature does support a real, if modest, edge. Cluster buying by C-suite executives, especially at market prices and in meaningful size, has been associated with outperformance over the next 6 to 12 months. But the average edge in those studies is on the order of a few percentage points, not a step change in the stock price. That is a useful tilt, and it is worth a lot to an active investor, but it is not the same as a guarantee of the “substantial gains” the copy promises.

There is also the question of which buys actually matter. On a Form 4 filing, the transaction code tells the story. An open-market purchase is coded “P.” An option exercise is “M,” and a stock award is “A,” often at zero cost. A cluster of “A” or “M” filings can look like insider confidence when it is really just compensation showing up on the books. Stock Gumshoe’s own read on Cardinal, where the CEO’s $3 million buy is a real “P” transaction, is that this is the genuine article. We explain how to read those transaction codes on a Form 4 in more depth. The broader lesson is that size and code both matter, and most of the money in this pitch is concentrated in Cardinal.

On the company-specific math, the picture is mixed. Cardinal at about 18X forward earnings is cheaper than Sterling’s 20X, and it is growing faster, at least on the revenue line. But the margin miss that triggered the selloff was a real crack in the story, and the dual-class structure means the reported market cap flatters the economics for common shareholders. Fiserv at 7X forward earnings is objectively cheap, but it is cheap because earnings are declining, and there is no guarantee the new CEO can turn it around. Energy Fuels has the most speculative math: the rare earths acquisitions are being paid for with shares at roughly 80X EBITDA for Vacuumschmelze and more than 20X sales for Australian Strategic Materials, which is a lot of dilution for assets that are not yet contributing to earnings.

What They Got Right

1. The thesis is sound and well-sourced. Insider buying, especially cluster buying by executives at market prices, has real academic support as a modest but persistent signal of outperformance.
2. The Cardinal call is specific and meaningful. A CEO buying $3 million of stock against a $450,000 salary, after a crash that followed a single earnings miss, is exactly the kind of “P”-coded, at-market purchase that the research says to pay attention to.
3. The framing around beaten-down, hated stocks is honest. The promo does not pretend these are momentum names; it leans into the fact that all three are out of favor, which is a more defensible pitch than chasing winners.
4. Michael Brush is a legitimate, credentialed presenter. He is a veteran financial journalist who edited Cabot’s cannabis letter before this one, and the underlying newsletter premise of tracking insider activity is concrete and transparent.

What They Got Wrong

1. “Substantial gains” oversells the signal. The academic edge from insider buying is real but modest, typically a few percentage points of relative outperformance, not the dramatic move the copy implies.
2. The urgency mechanism is a season, not a catalyst. “As we head into September” is a marketing nudge, not an event. There is no date-driven reason to act now, which makes the pitch less time-sensitive than it sounds.
3. The Fiserv “85% recurring revenue” framing hides the real problem. Recurring revenue is only valuable if it is growing; Fiserv’s is flat to down, which is why the stock is cheap, and the pitch does not dwell on that.
4. Energy Fuels’ insider buy is thin relative to the company’s size. The CEO’s roughly $1 million purchase is his largest-ever, but it is a rounding error against a $3.9 billion market cap, and the expensive share-funded rare earths deals dilute shareholders more than the pitch lets on.
5. The Cardinal dual-class structure is glossed over. Nearly half of the company’s economics are tied up in non-traded Class B shares, so the headline market cap and the “114% earnings growth” figure both flatter the common shareholder’s position.

The Verdict

This is a well-constructed pitch wrapped around a genuinely reasonable idea. Insider buying is a real signal, and the specific buys here, especially Cardinal’s coordinated post-crash cluster, are the kind of thing worth noticing. But the pitch is not a reason to buy all three names on a specific day. There is no hard catalyst, just a seasonal nudge, and the “substantial gains” framing oversells what the research actually supports.

If you want the insider-buying idea in its purest form, Cardinal is the name that fits the thesis best: a fresh, volatile rollup where management put real money to work after a real crash. It is also the riskiest, given the dual-class structure and the share-funded acquisition model. Fiserv is the most defensible on valuation but the least exciting on growth. Energy Fuels is a thematic bet on uranium and rare earths that happens to have an insider-buying garnish on top, and the expensive, dilutive acquisitions argue for patience. Treat this as a watchlist of three legitimate companies, not a three-stock “buy now” basket. If you want to understand the underlying signal rather than the specific picks, our insider buying explainer walks through the research and the mechanics.

This is not financial advice. NewsletterVetter has no position in any stock mentioned. Stock Gumshoe’s author disclosed that he owns shares of Brookfield Corp, Brookfield Asset Management, and Toast, and will not trade in any covered stock for at least three days after publication, per Stock Gumshoe’s trading rules.