Snowflake Inc. (NYSE: SNOW) director Frank Slootman sold 348,020 shares across August 18 and 19, 2026, generating total proceeds of $97.4 million. The shares were sold at prices ranging from $319.07 to $333.37 each, according to the disclosed transaction details. Slootman led Snowflake as CEO from 2019 until February 2024 — a tenure that included the company's September 2020 IPO — and previously served as CEO of ServiceNow and Data Domain.

SNOW currently trades around $321, sitting just below its 52-week high of $341.95. The stock has gained 65% over the past year. Snowflake provides a cloud-based data platform used by enterprises for data warehousing, data engineering, and analytics workloads. Unlike subscription-software vendors, Snowflake bills customers for the compute and storage they actually consume, a usage-based model that makes product revenue growth a closely watched gauge of underlying demand.

The sales were carried out under a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan that Slootman put in place on September 19, 2025. Such plans are pre-scheduled in advance and are a standard way for executives and directors to sell stock without running into insider trading concerns. Because the schedule is locked in months ahead, planned sales are generally read as saying less about an insider's current view of a company than discretionary open-market trades. The SEC also tightened the rule in late 2022, adding cooling-off periods between a plan's adoption and its first trade, along with expanded disclosure requirements around executive trading plans.

The transactions also involved stock options. Slootman exercised options to acquire 300,000 shares at $8.88 per share — a total cost of $2.66 million — before selling those shares at substantially higher market prices.

The filings show that on August 18, Slootman acquired 251,010 shares through option exercises and sold 299,030 shares. The following day, August 19, he acquired and sold an additional 48,990 shares.

After the transactions, Slootman's direct holding stands at just 28,535 shares — an 89.79% reduction in his direct position. He continues to hold shares indirectly through several family trusts.

A Pattern of Selling

The August transactions are not a one-off. Slootman has been selling steadily for months. In May alone, he sold more than 837,000 shares across two transactions, then sold another 400,000 shares in late May, followed by hundreds of thousands of additional shares through June and July. All of those sales were also executed under the same pre-arranged trading plan.

The most recent batch was completed at notably higher prices than earlier sales in the year. Slootman's June sales were priced between roughly $224 and $264 per share, while the August sales were executed in a range of $319 to $333, reflecting how far the stock has climbed over that stretch.

Analysts Remain Mostly Bullish

Despite the heavy insider selling, Wall Street has not turned cold on SNOW. Of 40 analysts tracked by MarketBeat, 34 maintain a Buy rating, five rate the stock a Hold, and just one carries a Sell rating. The consensus price target sits at $320.65, roughly in line with where the stock has recently traded.

Several firms have recently raised their targets. UBS lifted its price target to $425, pointing to strong AI demand and forecasting 36-37% revenue growth for the second quarter. TD Cowen raised its target to $370 alongside a Buy rating, Needham increased its target to $330, and Piper Sandler moved to $320. The AI demand that UBS cites runs through Snowflake's core billing structure: the company has built out Cortex AI, a suite of large-language-model and machine-learning tools embedded directly in its platform, and AI workloads are billed through the same consumption model as its other services.

Latest Earnings and Institutional Activity

Snowflake last reported earnings on May 27. Revenue came in at $1.39 billion, up 33.5% year over year and ahead of analyst estimates of $1.32 billion. Earnings per share of $0.39 topped the $0.32 consensus.

Institutional investors have also been adding to their positions. Vanguard raised its stake by 5.1% during the fourth quarter, Jennison Associates increased its position by 27.7%, and Norges Bank opened a new position worth roughly $974 million.

Snowflake's next earnings report is expected to be a closely watched event, with UBS forecasting 36-37% product revenue growth for the quarter. Snowflake's fiscal year ends January 31, so the upcoming release is its fiscal second-quarter report, which the company has historically delivered in late August or early September — putting results just weeks after these filings.

Source: CoinCentral