A new Ameresco (AMRC) director and the founder put $1.18 million of their own money into the stock

Back in July, I wrote about Millennium Management quietly building a stake of just over 5 percent in Ameresco (AMRC), the same week the clean-energy stock closed at its lowest price of the year. A giant fund buying a beaten-down name is interesting on its own. What caught my eye this week is that the company's own people started doing the same thing, and one of them had barely walked in the door.

A new director's $1 million buy

A Form 4 filed on August 11 shows Brian Cox, a new Ameresco director, buying 39,700 shares at $25.07 in the open market on August 10 for $995,279. The filing carries transaction code P, the SEC's tag for a purchase an insider chooses to make, not stock the company hands over as pay. Cox is about as new as a director gets. His first SEC filing is dated August 4, and after the standard grant of 5,132 restricted stock units that every Ameresco director receives, his next move was to put nearly a million dollars of his own money into the shares.

Cox built the whole position in the open market, within about a week of joining the board, and he bought a little above where Ameresco had bottomed two weeks earlier. A new director moving that fast, with his own cash, is a pointed thing to do. Someone who just got a close look at the company decided the stock was worth owning at this price.

A newly appointed HubSpot (HUBS) director did almost the same thing last week, buying about $200,000 of that stock days after its worst single-day drop on record. A director joining while the stock is down and then buying isn't something you see every week, and it usually carries the same message.

The founder joins in

George Sakellaris, Ameresco's founder and chief executive, bought some shares as well, but on a much smaller scale. He picked up 7,000 shares between August 7 and 11 for a combined $180,920, an average near $25.85. He already owns close to a million shares outright, so 7,000 more barely moves his stake. But the founder who started the company in 2000 was adding after a rough year for the stock, not heading for the exit. Between them, the two spent about $1.18 million on the open market in early August.

How the stock got here

Ameresco peaked near $45 last October, then slid for months, bottoming at $18.38 on July 29. Part of that was the broad retreat from clean-energy stocks as federal tax credits for wind and solar head toward a phase-out. Part of it was closer to home. The company is spending heavily to build and own energy projects, carrying a lot of debt to do it, and coming off a soft first quarter. By late July, the shares had lost almost 60 percent from their high.

Then earnings changed the mood. After the close on August 3, Ameresco reported second-quarter revenue of $515.5 million, up 9 percent and about 10 percent ahead of estimates. Its order backlog reached a record $6.7 billion, with $1.2 billion of that coming from new data center projects. The company raised its profit outlook for the year. The stock opened the next morning up roughly 40 percent, then gave back much of it to close August 4 up about 23 percent.

Revenue and the record backlog drove that jump. Profit went the other way. Adjusted earnings per share only matched estimates and came in lower than a year ago, and the raised guidance leaned partly on a change in how Ameresco books its tax credits. The enthusiasm cooled fast. Over the next week, the stock eased from nearly $28 back toward $25, which is right where Cox and Sakellaris were buying.

The data center angle

The data center detail connects back to that July piece. When Millennium's stake surfaced, Ameresco's work powering data centers was still tiny, more an option on the theme than a real line of business. The Q2 report put a number on it. Of the new orders, $1.2 billion came from data center projects, five of them, together more than a gigawatt of capacity. Management says most of that revenue lands in 2028 and later, so it's a slow build, but it's no longer just a talking point.

None of this tells you what the stock does next. A single director's purchase, even a big one, is one person's read on one day. Sakellaris's buy is small enough to overread. And insiders are wrong plenty, especially at a company still burning cash to grow. What the filings show is narrow and real. A director who just joined put nearly a million dollars into Ameresco within a week, and the founder added to a stake he already held, both while the shares sat near the low end of their range for the year. Whether copying insider buys actually works is a separate question, and we went through the data on that here. Ameresco's full filing history lives on its filings page.

Sources

• Brian C. Cox Form 4, Ameresco, Inc., filed with the SEC August 11, 2026
• Brian C. Cox Form 3 (initial statement of ownership), filed August 4, 2026
• George P. Sakellaris Form 4, Ameresco, Inc., filed August 11, 2026
• Ameresco Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results, investor relations release
• Live and historical market data for AMRC as of August 12, 2026

This is general market information, not investment advice. Always do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed financial professional before making any investment decision.