What 440 Insider Trades Told Me About Who's Really Buying
By Annie
There's a saying in finance: "Insiders sell for many reasons, but they only buy for one." That one reason? They think the stock is going up.
I've always been fascinated by insider trading data — not the illegal kind you see in movies, but the perfectly legal, publicly disclosed kind. Every time a company executive, director, or major shareholder buys or sells their own company's stock, they're required to file a Form 4 with the SEC within two business days. It's all public. It's all free. And almost nobody looks at it.
So I did.
What Is Form 4 Insider Trading Data?
When we say "insider trading" in the legal sense, we're talking about transactions made by corporate insiders — people like CEOs, CFOs, board members, and anyone who owns more than 10% of a company. The SEC requires them to disclose every trade they make in their own company's securities.
These disclosures land on the SEC's EDGAR database as Form 4 filings. Each filing tells you:
- Who made the trade (name, title, relationship to the company)
- What they traded (common stock, options, derivatives)
- When the transaction happened
- How much they bought or sold (shares and dollar value)
- What kind of transaction it was (open market purchase, option exercise, gift, etc.)
This is about as close as you can get to seeing what the people who actually know a company think about its future prospects.
Why Should You Care?
Here's the thing — insiders have information advantages. Not illegal inside information (hopefully), but the kind of deep operational knowledge that comes from running a company day to day. They know the pipeline. They know the margins. They know if that big contract is about to close.
Academic research has consistently shown that insider purchases, specifically open-market buys where executives spend their own money, tend to precede positive stock performance. A 2023 meta-analysis found that stocks with significant insider buying outperformed the market by an average of 4-8% over the following 12 months.
Insider selling is less informative — executives sell for taxes, diversification, house purchases, divorce settlements, you name it. But when someone writes a personal check to buy more of their own company? That's a signal worth paying attention to.
What I Found in the Data
I pulled the most recent Form 4 filings from SEC EDGAR and ran them through our data pipeline. Here's what came out:
- 440 total transactions across recent filings
- 11 insider buy alerts — open-market purchases where executives voluntarily bought shares with their own money
- $873,000 in total buy-side dollar volume across those 11 alerts
The 440 transactions include everything: option exercises, automatic plan transactions, gifts, and the routine stuff that generates noise. The 11 buy alerts are the signal — the transactions where someone chose to put their money where their mouth is.
What struck me is how concentrated the buying was. Out of hundreds of transactions, only about 2.5% were genuine open-market purchases. Most of the activity was routine — option exercises, tax-related sales, pre-planned dispositions under 10b5-1 plans. The buys stand out precisely because they're rare and deliberate.
I also noticed some interesting patterns in the transaction codes. The most common codes were F (tax withholding), A (grants/awards), M (option exercises), and S (sales). The P codes — purchases — were the minority, which makes them that much more interesting when they show up.
How to Use This on kibble.shop
This is one of the first data products live on kibble.shop, and I built it to be useful whether you're a retail investor doing research, a quant looking for signals, or just a data nerd like me who likes poking at financial datasets.
Here's what you'll find:
The Insider Trades Dashboard shows all transactions with filtering and sorting. You can slice by company, insider name, transaction type, or date range. It's the raw feed, cleaned up and made browsable.
The Buy Alerts Section highlights just the open-market purchases — the signal trades. These are the ones where an insider voluntarily bought shares on the open market with their own money. Each alert shows the insider's name, title, company, number of shares, price, and total value.
The data updates as new Form 4 filings hit EDGAR, so you're always seeing recent activity.
What This Isn't
A few important caveats, because I'm a data scientist, not a financial advisor:
- This is not investment advice. Insider buying is one signal among many. Don't buy a stock just because the CEO did.
- Context matters. A $10,000 purchase by a billionaire CEO means something very different than a $10,000 purchase by a newly appointed director.
- Timing varies. Insiders can file up to two business days after the transaction, and our pipeline adds a small additional lag. This is for research and analysis, not high-frequency trading.
What's Next
This is just the beginning. The insider trading dataset is one of many data products I'm building on kibble.shop. The whole point is to take publicly available financial data, clean it up, derive useful signals from it, and make it accessible to everyone — not just the hedge funds with Bloomberg terminals.
If you want to explore the data yourself, head over to kibble.shop/insider-trading and poke around. It's free, and I'd love to hear what patterns you find.
Happy digging. 🐾
Annie Lebot is a data scientist and the founder of kibble.shop, a financial data marketplace. She spends an unreasonable amount of time reading SEC filings so you don't have to.