What Are Corporate Insiders Buying? We Built a Free Dashboard to Find Out

Here's a thing most retail investors don't realize: corporate insiders — CEOs, CFOs, board members — are required by law to disclose when they buy or sell their own company's stock. Every single transaction. Within two business days.

This data is public. It's filed with the SEC as Form 4, and anyone can read it. The problem? EDGAR's interface is... let's say optimized for lawyers, not traders. Raw XML filings. No filtering. No aggregation. No way to quickly answer: "What are insiders actually buying right now?"

So we built a dashboard that answers that question. For free.

Why insider trading data matters

Let's be clear: we're talking about legal insider trading — the kind where executives file public disclosures, not the kind that gets you on the news.

Academic research has consistently shown that insider purchases, in particular, tend to precede positive stock performance. This makes intuitive sense: executives sell for all sorts of reasons (diversification, taxes, buying a house, divorce), but they generally only buy when they genuinely believe the stock is undervalued.

Put differently: insider purchases are a signal. Not a guaranteed one — nothing in markets is — but one of the few information edges that's both legal and accessible to retail investors.

What we built

The Insider Trading Tracker is kibble.shop's first data product. It takes SEC Form 4 filings and turns them into something you can actually use:

• A filterable dashboard — search by ticker, insider name, or company. Filter by transaction type (purchases, sales, grants, exercises). Sort by date or value.
• Summary stats — total buy volume vs. sell volume at a glance, plus the biggest trade in your current view.
• A developer-friendly API — hit /api/insider-trading?type=purchase&ticker=AAPL&limit=50 and get clean JSON back.

Some things that jumped out from the data

We're working with our initial sample dataset right now (live SEC feed coming soon), but even the sample tells interesting stories:

The pattern is pretty typical: most large-cap CEO sales are planned dispositions (tax optimization, diversification under 10b5-1 plans). The signal is in the purchases — especially from directors and officers at mid-cap companies who aren't on autopilot sell schedules.

Using the API

If you're building trading tools, research pipelines, or apps that need market data, the insider trading API is ready to go:

# Get all insider purchases
curl https://kibble-shop.vercel.app/api/insider-trading?type=purchase

# Filter by ticker
curl https://kibble-shop.vercel.app/api/insider-trading?ticker=AAPL

# Combine filters
curl https://kibble-shop.vercel.app/api/insider-trading?type=purchase&ticker=NVDA&limit=10

Returns clean JSON. No auth required (for now — we're free while we build). Rate limits are generous. Go nuts.

Why I built this

I'm Annie — a data scientist turned entrepreneur, originally from France. kibble.shop started as a hobby project because I was frustrated with how hard it was to get clean, usable financial data without paying enterprise prices or scraping together janky CSV files from five different sources.

I figured: the SEC literally publishes this stuff for free. Someone should make it actually usable. So here we are.

The goal is simple: build the best free financial data platform for independent traders, researchers, and developers. No VC-funded bloat. No enterprise sales team. Just good data, clean APIs, and a dashboard that doesn't make your eyes bleed.

What's next

• Live SEC EDGAR feed — we're connecting directly to EDGAR's XBRL filings for real-time Form 4 ingestion. No more sample data.
• Cluster analysis — when multiple insiders at the same company buy within a short window, that's called a cluster buy. It's a stronger signal than individual purchases. We're building detection for this.
• Alerts — get notified when insiders at companies you follow make significant moves. Email and API webhooks.
• More data products — insider trading is just the start. Options flow, earnings surprises, macro indicators — we're building a catalog of financial data products that actually don't suck.

Try it

The Insider Trading Dashboard is live right now. Go poke around. Filter for purchases. See what catches your eye.

If you're building something and want the API, it's at /api/insider-trading — no signup needed yet.

And if you want to know when we ship the next data product, drop your email. No spam. Just data nerd updates from someone who's genuinely excited about financial data.

— Annie 🐾