CEOs buy shares at Schwab, Nike and GE Healthcare
Posted: June 02, 2026
June 1, 2026 (Maple Hill Syndicate) –- As a starting point in picking stocks, you could do a lot worse than looking for companies where insiders are buying shares.
In particular, I like to see buys by chief executive officers (CEOs). They know the company better than anyone.
Here are three recent CEO purchases of note.
Charles Schwab
Richard Wurster, the CEO of Charles Schwab Corp., bought $1.8 million in Schwab stock on May 28. This was his first purchase since 2024, and his largest to date. He had sold shares in 2022 and 2025.
Wurster now owns shares worth $19.4 million, as of the end of May. The stock sells for 17 times earnings, which doesn’t seem exorbitant to me, given that Schwab increased its revenue 24% in the past year, and profits jumped 48%.
Many stock brokerage companies carry a lot of debt, but Schwab’s debt level is moderate, and it has $1.36 in cash for each dollar of debt.
Nike
The past three years have been unkind to Nike Inc. (NKE) stock. It has fallen 55%. Once a hot growth stock, lately it’s at best a comeback story.
Revenue growth, which had averaged 7% a year for the past decade, dropped into negative territory (-1.5%) in the past four quarters. Earnings fell 50%.
In the face of all this bad news, CEO Elliott Hill put up $1 million in April to add to his Nike holdings, which now total about $12 million.
Around the same time, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple Inc. (AAPL) spent $1 million to buy more Nike stock. Cook owns about $1 billion of Apple shares, and about $6 million of Nike. Two other directors also bought shares in April.
Nike shares aren’t exactly cheap yet. But they are starting to looking interesting to me at 1.5 times per-share sales. The price-to-sales ratio can be helpful in pointing to potential turnarounds.
Part of Nike’s troubles come from the frosty state of relations between the U.S. and China, and from tariffs erected by the Trump administration. Many of its shoes are made in Vietnam, and a good portion are made in China. In addition, it has historically sold a lot of shoes in China, but fewer lately.
GE Healthcare
One of the three companies created by the split-up of General Electric Co. in 2023 and 2024 was GE HealthCare Technologies Inc. (GEHC). Based in Chicago, the company makes machines for x-rays, MRIs, CT scans and ultrasound scans, among other things.
GE HealthCare has been independent for more than three years now, and the stock has managed a paltry gain of just under 4%.
At $62, the stock sells for less than 15 times earnings, a territory I like. It shows healthy profits, with a return on stockholders’ equity of 19%. Growth has been modest, though: Sales increased 6% over the past four quarters, and earnings less than 4%.
On the last day of April, CEO Peter Arduini bought some shares. In May, three directors bought some, as did chief financial officer James Saccaro.
I think all three of the companies discussed today are solid companies, and that investors should consider all three.
Performance
This is the 78th column I’ve written (starting in 1999) about insiders’ purchases and sales. Results have been mixed.
The stocks I said to avoid, even though insiders were buying, have trailed the Standard & Poor’s 500 Total Return Index by an average of 24.3 percentage points in the year following publication. They were well worth avoiding.
The stocks where I noted insider selling have lagged behind the index by 4.9 percent points.
Stocks where I described insider buys, but made no recommendation or an ambiguous comment, have beaten the S&P by more than 14 percentage points.
All of that is fine, but now the bad news. Stocks I recommended based on insider buying have returned an average of 8.9% in a year. That’s not as good as the 11.2% average for the index.
Bear in mind that my column results are hypothetical and shouldn’t be confused with results I obtain for clients. Also, past performance doesn’t predict the future.
In my column on this topic a year ago, I recommended UnitedHealth Group inc. (UNH). I said it had been “punished too harshly” after a barrage of bad news, including the fatal shooting of one of its top executives.
UnitedHealth returned 23.6% from June 16, 2025 through May 29, 2026. Not bad, but the S&P total return was better, at 27.1%.
Disclosure: Charles Schwab is the custodial broker for most of my clients’ accounts, and for most of my family’s accounts.
John Dorfman is chairman of Dorfman Value Investments LLC in Boston, Massachusetts. He or his clients may own or trade securities discussed in this column. He can be reached at jdorfman@dorfmanvalue.com.