Key points
- Accenture's CEO bought about $3 million of stock
- It's Julie Sweet's first open-market Accenture buy in 299 Form 4s
- An Accenture director bought on the same day
- Accenture shares had nearly doubled from their June low
Something interesting turned up on our insider-buying tracker this week. Accenture (ACN) Chair and CEO Julie Sweet bought 12,200 shares for about $3.0 million on Oct. 26, according to a Form 4 filed Oct. 28.
That made me curious enough to go back through every Form 4 she's filed. There are 299 of them, starting in April 2010, and this is the first one that reports a purchase on the open market. The others cover shares granted or bought through company plans, shares held back for taxes, and sales.
Director Paula Price bought 800 shares the same day for about $200,000, her own Form 4 shows. Her Accenture filings start in May 2014, and it's her first open-market purchase in them too. Across all 804 Accenture Form 4s filed since June 2023, these two are the only open-market buys.
What the two filings show
Sweet bought in two batches: 2,100 shares at an average of $245.11 and 10,100 shares at an average of $246.17. Individual trades ran from $244.59 to $246.54. Both carry code P, which marks a purchase, and the Form 4 doesn't indicate that the purchase was made under a 10b5-1 trading plan. That's a schedule an executive can set up in advance to buy or sell automatically, and we explained how it works here. After the purchase, she held 48,910 Accenture shares directly.
Price paid an average of $249.81 a share, a little above Accenture's closing price of $247.23 that day.
Why does the timing stand out?
Accenture stock ended 2025 at $268.30. On June 18, Accenture reported fiscal third-quarter results. New bookings fell 2% from a year earlier to $19.32 billion, and the company's updated forecast called for revenue growth of 3% to 4% in local currency for the year. The shares fell 18% that day to $127.98 and hit their lowest close of the year, $124.44, on June 30.
Five days after the drop, on June 23, Accenture added $2 billion to planned share buybacks for the fiscal year, and she said in the release, "we do not believe our current share price reflects that position or the strength of our business fundamentals." That buyback used the company's money. Her own $3 million came four months later.
On Oct. 1, Accenture reported fourth-quarter revenue of $18.68 billion, above the top of the company's own forecast range. Accenture's forecast for fiscal 2027 calls for revenue growth of 3% to 6% in local currency. The shares jumped 15.8% that day. Accenture closed at $243.40 on Oct. 28, up 96% from the June 30 low by our calculations, though still about 9% below the 2025 year-end close.
On June 23, the day of her comment, Accenture closed at $127.01. Her average price on Oct. 26 was $245.99, almost twice that.
Hasn't she been selling?
Yes, and her Form 4s show sales in every year from 2011 through 2026. The most recent sales came on Feb. 3 and Feb. 10, when she sold 11,557 shares for about $2.79 million. Those trades ran through a 10b5-1 plan, at average prices between $236.11 and $249.75. That's a few hundred fewer shares than she just bought, at about the same price.
Those February sales were made under instructions set in advance. The Oct. 26 filing doesn't indicate a plan.
What doesn't the filing say?
A Form 4 gives the date, the size, the price, and whether a plan was involved. The form doesn't ask for her reason or whether she plans to buy more. Insider purchases tend to be a cleaner signal than sales, but the research on copying them is mixed, as I went through in a separate piece.
Both purchases sit on our insider-buying tracker, where I found them, and new Accenture filings land on the ACN stock page as they arrive. This is general information, not investment advice.
