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Last Friday, eight insiders put savings on top of salary at three unloved stocks.

The first rule of personal finance: don’t keep your savings where you collect your paycheck. If the company stumbles, you lose the job and the nest egg in the same month.

Insiders already live on the wrong side of that rule. Salary, bonus, career, reputation — all of it rides on one company. So when an executive reaches into his savings and buys even more exposure, he’s breaking the cardinal rule of diversification on purpose. It’s like a waiter spending his tips to buy a piece of the restaurant that employs him. His rent already depends on the dinner rush. He doesn’t double down unless he’s seen something in the reservation book the customers can’t.

Last week, that kind of doubling-down showed up in three different corners of the market at once — most of it on a single Friday.

Three companies. Eight insiders. More than $13 million of their own money, all of it inside one week.

Let’s take them one at a time -

Stewart Information Services Corporation (STC) — Recent Price: $43.43

Breakdown: Stewart is one of America’s big four title insurers — it’s been verifying that home sellers actually own what they’re selling since 1893. Title insurance is a one-time premium collected whenever a property changes hands, which means the business lives and dies with transaction volume. And with mortgage rates pressuring residential activity, volume is scarce.

On October 21, Stewart reported a third quarter that was good on the top line and ugly underneath: revenue grew 13% to $900.7 million, but adjusted earnings of $1.33 a share came in well below the $1.51 analysts expected — and down from $1.64 a year ago. CEO Fred Eppinger didn’t sugarcoat it: “This quarter, we faced increased industry headwinds that we anticipate will continue into next year.”

That Friday, October 23, the stock fell more than 10% in a single day.

And while it was falling, the people who run the place were buying it. Four directors — Thomas Apel, C. Allen Bradley Jr., William Corey Jr., and Deborah Matz — bought that same Friday, at prices from roughly $43.91 up to $48. When the filings landed days later, they showed a fifth buyer in the cluster: CEO Eppinger himself, 3,000 shares at $44.45, about $133,000. Five insiders, $461,000. The stock kept sliding anyway, touching a 52-week low near $42.73 this week.

Which produces something you don’t often get: you can buy this stock today for less than every one of those five insiders paid.

Now the value math. Stewart’s book value — assets minus liabilities — is $54.82 per share. The stock trades near $43.43, about 79 cents for each dollar of book, and book value grew 4% over the past year even in a frozen housing market. The company raised its annual dividend by a dime this year to $2.20 a share, good for a 5.1% yield while you wait. The four analysts covering it carry an average target of $69.75.

The honest risks? The CEO himself says the headwinds run into next year, and he’d know. Profits fell by nearly a third even as revenue grew, the fastest-growing segment got there largely through a recent acquisition, and the added debt is pushing interest costs up. These are also the smallest checks in today’s issue — conviction, but low-six-figures conviction. If housing stays frozen longer than expected, cheap can stay cheap.

Gentherm Incorporated (THRM) — Recent Price: $33.16

Breakdown: If your car seat has ever warmed your back in January or cooled it in July, there’s a good chance Gentherm built the hardware. And on October 1 the company roughly changed species: it closed a combination with Modine’s Performance Technologies business — thermal management for commercial vehicles, off-highway equipment, and power generation — handing Modine shareholders about 44% of the combined company and paying its own holders a special dividend of $2.07 a share on the way through.

Then came the first earnings report of the new era, on October 22, and it was a mess. Revenue rose 4.7% to $405 million, but adjusted earnings of $0.33 a share landed at roughly half the $0.65 analysts expected, with material costs and currency squeezing margins. The stock was already sitting near a 52-week low of $25.31 — down from a high of $48.35.

The next day, Friday the 23rd, two insiders stepped in. CEO Bill Presley bought 5,000 shares at $26.00. And Paul Mascarenas — the former Chief Technical Officer of Ford, who joined Gentherm’s board on October 1 when the Modine deal closed — bought 20,000 shares at $26.63, about $533,000, multiplying his stake roughly eightfold. Three weeks into the job, the new director’s first big move was writing a personal check.

They weren’t the only buyers. Gentherm’s board authorized a $400 million buyback in July — nearly a quarter of the entire company at today’s $1.7 billion market cap — and the company repurchased $60 million of stock in October alone. CFO Jon Douyard’s exact words: the company believes “the current share price does not reflect the value of the Company.” Net leverage is a conservative 0.4 times EBITDA, and full-year guidance went up with Modine in the fold.

The market is coming around: the stock has climbed roughly 25% off the insider purchase prices to $33.16 — still roughly a third below its 52-week high, at about 11 times forward earnings. Nine analysts rate it a Buy on average, with a $48 target.

The honest risks? The earnings miss was real — margins are getting squeezed, and vehicle production in its key markets is declining. Integrating an 18,000-person company across 17 countries rarely goes exactly to plan, and deal costs have already run $34 million this year. And unlike Stewart, the easy money here is gone: you’d be paying about 27% more than the CEO did a week ago.

Stride, Inc. (LRN) — Recent Price: $80.10

Breakdown: Stride is the biggest operator of online K-12 public schools and career-learning programs in the country — about 241,000 students logged in last quarter. A year ago this week, it had the worst day in its history: the stock fell 48% in a single session after a botched technology-platform rollout cost the company an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 enrollments. From a record high near $155, the shares now sit at $80.

A lot has changed in that year. A new CEO, Robert Knowling, took over in July. And in early October, Stride signed a cooperation agreement with Fivespan Partners, an activist investment firm: Fivespan’s founder, Dylan Haggart, joined the board and now co-chairs a new capital-allocation committee with one job — publish a plan for the company’s balance sheet, on a roughly three-month clock that runs out around January. The balance sheet in question holds $884 million in cash and investments, more than a quarter of Stride’s entire $3.3 billion market value.

On October 20, Stride reported quarterly results: revenue up 3% to $639 million, adjusted earnings of $1.37 a share — comfortably ahead of estimates — but enrollment down 2.5%, the platform scars still visible. The stock slipped about 3%.

Then, on October 23 and 26, Haggart’s fund bought 154,196 shares for about $12.2 million, at an average near $78.98, lifting Fivespan’s stake to roughly 4.6% of the company. The director with the newest seat at the table — and a January deadline — just made his firm’s bet meaningfully bigger, at almost exactly today’s price.

What’s he paying? About 8.8 times next year’s expected earnings. The S&P 500 trades around 21 times. That’s a market-leader franchise, a quarter of its value in cash, priced like the problems are permanent.

The honest risks? This is one buyer, not a cluster — and an activist adding to an existing position has his own agenda. Enrollment is still shrinking, and management concedes the platform fixes aren’t finished. Of that cash pile, $420 million is spoken for by convertible notes due in 2027. Analysts are as divided as we’ve seen — targets run from $38 all the way to $115 — and the shareholder lawsuits from last year’s crash are still working through the courts. The committee’s January plan could also simply disappoint.

— The Daily Wall Street Alerts Team

This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Always conduct your own due diligence before making any investment decisions.