The Vickers Top Buyers & Sellers is a daily report that identifies the five companies the largest insider purchase transactions based on the dollar value of the transactions as well as the five companies the largest insider sales transactions based on the dollar value of the transactions.

NetApp Inc. is a pure-play data storage company, providing enterprise network storage and data management solutions, including storage hardware, software, and services. NetApp has a major converged-infrastructure partner in Cisco, and key data center partners, including Microsoft, Google, and AWS. In 2011, NetApp acquired big data hardware provider Engenio. In February 2016, it acquired all-flash array maker SolidFire.

Insider-sentiment data from Vickers Stock Research continues to bounce wildly from week to week, resulting in no discernable trend. Indeed, stock investors (insiders included) are responding to major earnings news, multiple geopolitical events, the possible reshaping of the U.S. federal government as we know it, interest-rate uncertainty, and fear that inflation (thought to be back in the bottle) is possibly about to burst higher again. For now, the good news is that the change in insider sentiment this week is mostly a positive one, with almost all of the sell/buy ratios from Vickers improving week over week. Keeping in mind that the lower the ratio, the better, Vickers' Total One-Week Sell/Buy Ratio is 3.84 versus 6.17 last week and the Total Eight-Week Sell/Buy Ratio is 5.78 versus 6.02. On an exchange basis, the NYSE one-week ratio is 4.68 versus 9.00 and the eight-week ratio is 5.69 versus 5.66 (the one outlier). For the Nasdaq, the one-week ratio is 3.35 versus 5.21 last week and the eight-week ratio is 6.05 versus 6.54. On a sector basis, selling was the greatest in Healthcare over the last week, with shares valued at $674 million sold versus $7 million bought. Next up was Information Technology, with $129 million sold, and Consumer Discretionary, with $101 million sold. Selling activity was also of note in Industrial, Consumer Staples, Financial, and Energy. There were no sectors in which insider buying outpaced selling. This week, analysts at Vickers highlighted insider transactions of interest at Targa Resources Corp. (NYSE: TRGP) and AppLovin Corp. (NGS: APP).

Argus believes that 2025 may be defined by 10 investment themes. Throughout the year, we will take a deep dive into these themes, providing updates and giving stock picks on the prominent companies whose businesses play out in each theme. In many cases, we believe these thematic factors will supersede industry characteristics and drive performance. Our Investment Themes for 2025 are: Theme 1: Management Signals; Theme 2: Artificial Intelligence; Theme 3: Clean Energy; Theme 4: Sustainable Impact investing; Theme 5: Innovation; Theme 6: Cybersecurity; Theme 7: Investing in the Cloud; Theme 8: Aerospace and Defense, All Systems Go; Theme 9: Uptick in Capex amid Declining Interest Rates; and Theme 10: Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology. For this week's Weekly List, we examine Theme 7: Investing in the Cloud. Cloud computing has transformed the technology landscape over the past decade. Created almost accidently as a means or organizing customer invoices, cloud has grown from the management of outsourced technology hardware resources to encompass tasks, up to and including software development, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI). Indeed, following availability of ChatGPT in November 2022, awareness of generative AI hit the business community like an electric shock, and has completely upended IT spending plans for the next several years. Given that delivery of AI will mainly occur within a hybrid cloud environment, emergence of AI-as-a-service represents a difficult-to-quantify, but undoubtedly positive driver of cloud service revenues in the coming years. The leading providers of cloud services tend to be large technology and communications services companies that provide many goods and services distinct from or adjacent to their cloud businesses. These companies include Amazon.com, Microsoft, Alphabet, and others in the U.S., along with Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and others in China. Collectively, participants in the cloud eco-system grew revenue by a high-teens compound annual rate from 2016 to 2023. Revenue for cloud services has held up well, as cloud transition is a long-tailed process and cloud transformation has become an imperative. According to IDC, revenue in the industry grew 21% in 2024. Looking ahead, with inflation growth slowing and amid improving business and consumer confidence, both consumer device demand and enterprise IT spending should accelerate. We expect rising device demand and enterprise IT spending both domestically and internationally to drive cloud investment in 2025 and beyond. Some of the companies that should benefit in the space include the following.