Key points
- Four Applied Digital (APLD) insiders had 3,045,000 shares vest on July 31. The dispositions are tax withholding, marked code F, not sales.
- 1,222,748 shares worth $33.49 million went to the tax, and all four executives finished the day owning more APLD.
- Director Richard Nottenburg made the week's one genuine sale: 75,000 shares for $2.34 million on August 4, code S.
- His Form 4, filed August 6, shows an open-market sale with the 10b5-1 box left blank. He still holds 133,378 shares.
Four Applied Digital (APLD) executives filed Forms 4 within hours of each other on August 4, and all four reported a disposition. That's the kind of cluster we stop and read. Four insiders heading for the exit at once would matter, particularly on a stock that had dropped to $23.22 the week before.
All four turned out to be tax bills.
One of the five filings was a real sale. It belongs to a director, and the Form 4 confirming it arrived on August 6. We'll get to him, but the four that only look like selling come first.
The executives had performance stock units vest on July 31 out of a single grant dated March 27, 2025. Applied Digital kept part of each award and paid the tax on it in cash. At the July 31 close of $27.39, the shares it kept came to $33.49 million.
| Insider | Role | Vested | Withheld for tax | Holdings after |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wes Cummins | CEO and chairman | 1,600,000 | 629,600 | 5,758,000 |
| Jason Zhang | President | 600,000 | 236,100 | 2,588,415 |
| Laura Laltrello | Chief operating officer | 600,000 | 260,640 | 813,156 |
| Saidal Mohmand | Chief financial officer | 245,000 | 96,408 | 888,431 |
Every one of them ended August 4 owning more of the company than they held on the morning of July 31. Wes Cummins, the chief executive, added close to a million shares to his direct stake.
Why one of these filings is being written up as a $2.6 million sale
The Motley Fool covered the smallest of the four on August 5. That's chief financial officer Saidal Mohmand, under the headline "CFO Sells $2.6 Million Stock of AI Growth Stock." The article itself is careful. It calls the transaction a sell-to-cover tied to the vesting, says his holdings rose, and closes on the reminder that an insider sale often carries no view of the company at all.
Here's how his Form 4 reads, with the $2.6 million sitting on the middle line.
| Line | Code | Shares | Holdings after |
|---|---|---|---|
| PSUs vested July 31 | A | 245,000 | 971,431 |
| Withheld for tax | F | 96,408 | 875,023 |
| Distribution from 272 Capital, LP | J | 13,408 | 888,431 |
He finished the day with 162,000 more shares than he started it with. That's about $4.4 million at the price the filing uses. Those withheld shares carry a value of $27.39 apiece because that's where Applied Digital closed on July 31, which is how a withholding gets priced.
How to tell a tax withholding from a sale
The Form 4 marks every transaction with a single letter, and the letter settles it. Code F means the company held shares back to cover the tax. Code S means the insider sold into the open market. Mohmand's middle line reads F, and so does the matching line on each of the other three filings. We went through the rest of the codes in our guide to reading a Form 4.
All four filings spell it out in a footnote too, in the company's own words. The withholding "does not constitute an actual sale or other open market transaction."
Our insider tracker counts code S and leaves code F alone. That's why these four land on the filings page instead of the selling column. A tracker that counted both would report a wave of insider selling every time an award vests, at every company we follow.
The insider who actually sold
Director Richard Nottenburg flagged a sale in advance on a Form 144 on August 4, and the confirming Form 4 arrived on August 6. He sold 75,000 shares on August 4 at a weighted average of $31.15, in trades ranging from $31.00 to $31.22, for $2,336,250. The transaction carries code S, the open-market sale code, on the same page of the tracker where the other four carry code F.
One detail on the form is worth the click. The 10b5-1 box sits empty. A 10b5-1 plan sets an insider's sales on a schedule months ahead, which takes most of the meaning out of the timing, and Nottenburg filed this one as a plain open-market sale instead. He picked the day himself. That day, August 4, was one on which APLD had climbed back to $31.27 after trading as low as $23.22 the week before, and the stock has since eased to about $28.90.
This is his second open-market sale in about three months, and his largest. In late April he sold 25,000 shares across two days for $832,375, at an average of $33.30. The August sale is three times that. It left him holding 133,378 shares, a figure that includes 7,747 restricted units that vest in November. He sold a little over a third of his stake and kept the rest, a holding worth close to $3.9 million at the current price.
Cummins has a second disposition on his own filing covering 714,685 shares that left an indirect holding. His footnotes describe it as a distribution from 272 Capital, LP, a fund he was president of, and those shares went to the fund's partners. Mohmand's third line is his own portion of that same distribution. Both stayed off the open market.
The filings settle what happened to the shares and stop there. Whether any of these five insiders thinks APLD is expensive is a separate question, and neither a vesting date set fifteen months in advance nor a single director's sale answers it. Applied Digital closed at $31.27 the day the sale went through and at $29.87 on August 5. We looked at how much insider filings really predict in a separate piece, and every Applied Digital filing lands on its filings page as it arrives.
Sources
- SEC Forms 4 filed August 4, 2026 for Saidal Mohmand (accession 0001628280-26-052805), Wes Cummins (0001391935-26-000005), Laura Laltrello (0002050897-26-000002) and Jason Gechen Zhang (0001900445-26-000002), including their footnotes
- SEC Form 4 for Richard Nottenburg, filed August 6, 2026 (accession 0001628280-26-054432), reporting a sale of 75,000 shares on August 4 at a weighted average of $31.15, code S, with the 10b5-1 box unchecked and 133,378 shares held afterward
- SEC Form 144 for Richard Nottenburg, filed August 4, 2026 (accession 0001950047-26-007614), giving advance notice of the sale
- Applied Digital daily closes, July 24 through August 6, 2026, and intraday pricing on August 5 and 6
- The Motley Fool, "CFO Sells $2.6 Million Stock of AI Growth Stock," August 5, 2026
