Often, one day changes the course of technological progress. For example…
- October 1, 1908: Ford Motor Company (F) Model T introduced.
- October 26, 1958: A Pan Am Boeing 707 has completed the first scheduled transatlantic jet service from New York to Paris.
- January 9, 2007: Steve Jobs came on stage and presented the iPhone.
- November 30, 2022: OpenAI has released ChatGPT.
These were not quiet, mysterious discoveries buried in the laboratory.
They arrived with a bang.
The Pan Am flight featured a full band and global press coverage. The iPhone ad attracted nearly 7,500 people in person, and live blogging attracted at least 400,000 more. ChatGPT was perhaps the most brilliant: it reached 1 million users in five days, then to an estimated 100 million monthly active users two months later.
However, Wall Street has a notable habit of acting surprised when a new technological era knocks on the door. Railroad stocks continued to rise for at least eight years after the world entered the jet age. (These companies would eventually collapse in the late 1960s.) BlackBerry Limited (for) Stocks rose for months after the iPhone was announced. and Software inventory This growth continued to balloon until the middle of last year, despite clear signs that AI was becoming adept at programming.
Investors could see the future on stage, but many continued to evaluate the past as if nothing had changed.
This is important because May 19 could mark another of those before-and-after moments.
On that day, one of the world’s most prominent AI companies will launch, said a senior analyst at InvestorPlace Eric Fry I believe it will be a game changer for AI products. They will be powered by a new form of technology that Eric calls “A-AI”.
If history is any guide, the market’s first reaction will be dangerously incomplete.
Fortunately, many industry insiders have already begun offering clues about which companies will be in the “blast zone” due to this disruption. They sell shares in the companies they run, and they do so faster than you might expect.
In this update, I’d like to highlight three companies with unusual insider sales as a clear signal to exit before May 19th.
Inventory for Sale #1: The Vanishing Independent Business Model
The first candidate for sale is a global online marketplace specializing in freelancing:
Fiver International Limited (FVRR).
Shares rose nearly 20% last week after management reported surprisingly strong results. Revenues of $105 million and earnings per share of $0.62 beat expectations by 1% each, reassuring markets that the freelance market is still alive.
However, a significant stake sale by the company’s CEO should give investors a reason to pause.
On April 30, a Securities and Exchange Commission filing revealed that Fiverr CEO Micah Kaufman had dramatically accelerated the pace of his previously authorized stock sales from about 20,000 annually to 66,000. This contrasted sharply with his upbeat comments in his prepared earnings remarks, where he claimed that “the fundamental (AI-powered) dynamics of this market are moving in our direction.”
I suspect that AI will quickly replace the type of work typically sold on Fiverr. Popular Fiverr services include website development, book publishing, and logo design – all things that ChatGPT and its competitors can now do. In fact, Anthropic’s Claude Cowork can create a $10,000 animation website almost instantly.
This poses a problem for the Israeli company, which has not achieved operating profits in the seven years since going public in 2019. The freelance market faces competition from AI-powered chatbots, and growth is stalling. Why pay a Fiverr freelancer $100 for a set of logos when you can have ChatGPT design thousands of them at no apparent cost?
The overhead costs of Fiverr are also high. Advertising costs eat up $0.31 for every dollar produced, leaving little money for anything else. Although the full-blown disaster hasn’t hit Fiverr’s finances yet, insiders don’t seem keen on sticking around to see what happens next.
Stock for Sale #2: The SaaS Company He Forgot “SaaSpocalyse.”
It’s been a bad year overall for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies — companies that charge monthly fees for access to cloud-based software. It was so bad that one SaaS index, the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (Value added tax), has fallen by 28% since last September due to fears of AI disruption. Individual nouns such as Monday.com Company (MNDY) and Atlassian Company (a team) It has performed even worse, losing more than 75% of its value since its peak in 2025.
With one exception:
Evercommerce Inc. (EVCM).
The $2 billion company’s shares have traded essentially sideways over the past year, outpacing the massive “SaaSpocalypse” that has consumed its peers. The stock trades for 18 times cash flow (close to its full historical average), and the casual observer might see nothing wrong with this company that creates software to help small businesses manage operations, invoicing, payments, and marketing.
That could change quickly.
As you can see, AI is turning the SaaS market upside down no Because it offers the comprehensive services offered by EverCommerce or Salesforce Inc. (Customer relationship management) He provides. This is a complex task that requires a small army of sales and qualification staff as well as a working product.
Instead, AI labs provide software tools that allow this Competitors To appear almost overnight and charge a fraction of what incumbents do. Bio-coding startups don’t need many engineers, and one Salesforce-based AI competitor called Twenty is said to have just 34 employees. They charge between $9 and $19 per month per seat…which is a tenth of what Salesforce typically charges.
EverCommerce Management doesn’t wait either. Since mid-2025, the company’s top executives (CEO, CFO, COO) have been selling available shares on the open market. Nearly $1 million worth of stock was sold across eight transactions.
Additionally, CEO Eric Remer sold stock through 10b5-1 plans faster than he earned it — a typical bearish sign. Last month alone, he sold $674,000 worth of stock this way… more than he earns from his entire year’s salary.
So, don’t be complacent about SaaS stocks that haven’t gone down yet; If insiders are exiting, this is often a sign that you should also exit.
Stock for Sale #3: Can AI Create TV Shows?
Executives in Netflix Inc. (NFLX) They have a long history of selling to strength. Co-CEO Gregory Peters made one big sale in July 2020 after the work-from-home craze nearly doubled the value of Netflix shares. It then made seven more profits between February 2024 and November 2025 after the stock recovered from the brutal sell-off of 2022.
Gregory Peters Netflix (NFLX) sales
Source: Tipranks
That’s why the latest round of selling last February should raise eyebrows. These sales occurred after shares fell more than 40% from their peak, marking the first time Peters has sold shares after such a large sale. Three other executives with similar selling histories did the same.
In fairness, I think these sales are premature. Analysts expect the video streaming company to achieve sales growth of 14% this year, supported by rising subscriber numbers and higher monthly fees. Moreover, we enter The most expensive midterm elections in historywhich should send Netflix’s ad revenue to new records.
However, the truth is that AI is coming to create videos as well. In fact, I think we may be only one to three years away from tools that can create entire TV shows with a single router.
There are actually a lot of signs that this could be happening. Last February, ByteDance released Seedance 2.0, an amazingly powerful model that created real-life clips of Hollywood actors. Frightened media companies immediately sent cease and desist orders to the Chinese company. (Netflix’s internal sales occurred in this period.)
Soon after, New York-based startup Runway began garnering attention online after releasing clever real-time avatars that ranged from the hyper-realistic to the bizarre.
Choose your next company avatar
Source: Al-Madraj
A-AI will enhance this process, allowing AI to not only create plots, scripts, characters, keyframes and full-length videos, but also giving the technology the tools to review and iterate its work until a near-perfect output is created. After all, AI models are increasingly able to evaluate and replicate their outputs. There’s no reason why it can’t do the same with creative work.
That’s why Netflix should start landing on investors’ long-term “sell” lists. Although shares are likely to rise over the next couple of months as election season begins (and first-quarter earnings beat estimates last week), the selling by insiders suggests they may be sensing long-term problems ahead from this emerging competitive threat.
The “A-AI” revolution.
Most investors have a bad habit of only looking in the rearview mirror. Value investors take long-term profits and draw a straight line through them. If a company averages $1 per share in earnings, this year’s $0.20 disappointment has to be temporary, right?
Meanwhile, growth investors and algorithmic traders often take rising revenue numbers or stock prices and draw a line through that.
Both strategies work well in normal times. Most value stocks recover, given enough time and capital. And most Growth stocks Keep going up. Buying the highest-performing companies in the S&P 500 and the cheapest ones routinely yields excellent results.
But technological disruptions tend to shortcut these trends. For example, the advent of the Internet has not destroyed many traditional “valuable” businesses such as brick-and-mortar retail. It also hurts “growth” companies like AOL by creating smarter competitors.
Smart phone applications such as Uber Technologies Inc. (Uber) It hurt both the traditional taxi medallion market and emerging car-sharing businesses like Zipcar.
We are now facing a new era that threatens the same fate for businesses in its path. Hundreds of companies will see their stock prices decline; The latest SaaSpocalypse is just the beginning.
To make sure you’re on the right side of this divide, Eric has released a special presentation called Agent account. He goes deeper into what “A-AI” is…and which stocks should benefit from this new technological era.
Plus, he reveals his top stocks to buy before this technology takes off.
Click here to watch Eric’s special now.
Until next week,
Thomas Young, CFA
Market Analyst, InvestorPlace
