Huntsman CEO buys $981,000 of stock after a 19% one day drop

Peter Huntsman bought 100,000 Huntsman shares for about $981,000 on Aug. 3, right after the stock's 19% one day drop. NRG fell 15.48% on Aug. 4 after earnings, and REH Advisors sold 2.375 million HF Sinclair shares back to the company.

NRG Energy fell 15.48% on its earnings day last week, and HF Sinclair paid about $212.3 million to buy back a block of its shares from REH Advisors. The insider trade that stood out was smaller.

Peter Huntsman bought 100,000 shares of his own company on Aug. 3, the first trading day after the stock lost nearly a quarter of its value in a week. He paid a weighted average of $9.81, in trades between $9.76 and $9.89, his Form 4 shows. That's about $981,000 by Lone Star Index math.

Huntsman is chairman, president and chief executive of Huntsman Corp., the chemical maker based in The Woodlands. The purchase was a code P open market trade, the preset trading plan box isn't checked, and he filed it the same day. He held 7,256,341 shares directly afterward, plus 933,328 through P&B Capital, L.C.

Huntsman shares had fallen 19.14% on July 31, the day after second quarter results, closing at $9.76. They ended at $10.02 on Aug. 3 and $10.12 on Aug. 7, up 3.69% for the week, using Yahoo Finance closes. Each Huntsman share is set to become 0.5476 Olin shares if the pending merger closes, so the stake he added would carry over into the combined company.

Our read

Next to what Peter Huntsman already owns, this purchase is modest. His Form 4 shows 7,256,341 shares held directly after the trade, so the 100,000 shares lifted his direct stake by about 1.4%, and with the 933,328 shares held through P&B Capital he's at about 8.2 million. Next to his pay it's bigger. The company's 2026 proxy statement says his realized compensation for 2025 was $5 million against target pay of $13.1 million, so he put about a fifth of last year's realized pay into one day of buying.

The form matters too. It's a code P open market purchase with the trading plan box left unchecked, made on the first trading day after the 19% drop, and he filed it the same day.

What he's buying is mostly Olin exposure. Under the merger terms, each Huntsman share would become 0.5476 Olin shares, Olin's Ken Lane would run the combined company and Huntsman would become non executive chairman. So we'd read this less as a bet on Huntsman Corp. alone and more as a bet on OlinHuntsman, a company he wouldn't run day to day. It also came about three weeks before the Aug. 25 vote, on a deal his own board approved unanimously and now needs holders to back. That doesn't make the purchase hollow, but it isn't a purely neutral read on value either.

It's still one insider, not a cluster. If other Huntsman directors buy before the vote, or the gap between HUN and its Olin exchange value narrows, that'd tell us more than this filing does.

NRG's rough Tuesday

NRG Energy (NRG) had the worst day of any Texas large cap we checked. Shares closed at $138.47 on Aug. 3 and $117.04 on Aug. 4, down 15.48%, after the Houston power company reported second quarter results that morning. For the week the stock fell 12.03%, from $134.29 to $118.13. Those are our calculations from Yahoo closes.

On paper the quarter looked strong. GAAP net income was $506 million against a loss of $104 million a year earlier, and adjusted EBITDA rose to $1.217 billion from $909 million, the earnings release shows. But adjusted earnings per share fell to $1.49 from $1.73, and MarketBeat put the consensus at $1.69. NRG said the LS Power assets it closed on added to results but also pushed up interest and depreciation. It kept 2026 guidance for adjusted EPS at $7.90 to $9.90.

"This is the model for how large load growth should work," Chief Executive Robert Gaudette said.

NRG's quarterly report, filed Aug. 4, lists Houston.

A $212 million block goes back to HF Sinclair

The biggest dollar figure in the week's Texas Form 4s wasn't a purchase at all. REH Advisors, which sits on HF Sinclair's board through a representative, sold 2,375,000 shares back to the company at $89.41 on Aug. 2 in a private deal, its Form 4 shows. That's about $212.3 million by our math, and REH still held 8,881,662 shares. HF Sinclair's current report, filed Aug. 5, says it paid with cash on hand, calls it the 22nd private deal of its kind with REH, and puts what's left in its buyback program at about $11 million. HF Sinclair (DINO) lists Dallas in its latest quarterly report.

Opaleye Management, the Boston fund that files as a 10% owner of Grapevine based Alpha Cognition (ACOG), kept adding. It bought 2,900 shares on July 31 at a weighted average of $7.92 and 50,000 on Aug. 3 at $8.00, about $423,000 in all, per its filing.

Dell (DELL) and Oracle (ORCL) both climbed more than 11% on the week, from $405.37 to $453.77 and from $129.87 to $147.02. The rest of the week's Texas filings were mostly option exercises and plan sales, and they're on Insider Radar. The sector view groups Huntsman, NRG and HF Sinclair with their peers.

What to watch

Huntsman's price history since the drop is on its company page.

Lone Star Index publishes research, not investment advice.

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