Tell me when insider trades matter for my stocks.

A Form 4 is the report a company insider files with the SEC every time they buy or sell shares of their own company, or receive or give them away. It lists who traded, when, how many shares, at what price and how many they hold afterwards. Footnotes explain the details, and that's where most of the story is.

Officers (CEO, CFO and other senior executives), directors, and anyone who owns more than 10% of a class of the company's shares. Funds and holding companies that cross 10% file too, which is why you'll see names like “OrbiMed Advisors” next to people.

By the end of the second business day after the trade. We read the previous day's filings every morning, so you usually see a trade two to four days after it happened. Some insiders file late; a filing that arrives more than 30 days after the trade is shown, but it doesn't count towards the signal score.

A Form 3 is filed within 10 days of becoming an insider and lists what they already own. A Form 5 is an annual catch-up, due 45 days after the company's fiscal year ends, for small or exempt transactions that weren't reported on a Form 4. Neither is a trade on the day, so they don't appear in the rankings.

No. Each line of a Form 4 carries a one-letter code, and only P and S are trades on the market or in a private deal. Sometimes a filing uses J (other) for what is clearly a sale or a disposition, for example shares handed out to a fund's investors. We read the footnote and classify it by what actually happened, not just by the letter.

A trading plan an insider sets up in advance, with dates, amounts or price rules fixed months before. Since 2023 the Form 4 has a checkbox for it, and officers and directors must wait at least 90 days between adopting a plan and the first trade. Because the decision was made long before, we usually treat plan sales as routine, with the exceptions in the next answer.

Yes. On November 9, 2020, Pfizer's CEO Albert Bourla sold 132,508 shares for $5.6 million under a 10b5-1 plan, on the same day Pfizer announced its vaccine was more than 90% effective and the stock jumped. He had adopted the plan on August 19, while the trials were running: 82 days earlier.

Since 2023 the SEC requires officers and directors to wait at least 90 days after adopting a plan, and allows a single-trade plan only once a year. Research has found that new plans, short waits and single-trade plans are where plans get used to time the market.

So we don't treat every plan sale as routine. We flag a sale as Plan under 90 days, Fresh plan (first sales within 120 days of adoption) or Single-trade plan, and mark it “Not routine”. Long-running plans that sell on a schedule stay in the routine pile.

An insider exercises stock options (code M) and sells the same shares the same day (code S). It turns compensation into cash and says little about what they think of the stock. We label it “Option cash-out”.

Insiders sell for taxes, houses, diversification, pre-set plans, option cash-outs and fund distributions. Very few sales are a bet against the company. We show every sale, mark the routine ones as noise, and flag the few that are a real choice and big enough to matter.

We take the amended information as soon as it's available. The Form 4/A replaces the original filing in our data, so a corrected trade is never counted twice.

We read the filings as filed, so you see the same information as everyone else. If the insider corrects it with a Form 4/A, we update as soon as the amendment appears.

For each insider and company in the period, purchases minus sales in dollars. A director who bought $500K and sold $100K is a net buyer of $400K.

How much the insider changed their own holdings: +50% means they now own half as much again; −40% means they sold 40% of what they had. Where the footnotes show trusts, family entities or other share classes, we count those too.

The shares traded as a share of all the company's shares outstanding. It shows how much the trade matters for the company, not for the insider.

We compare each insider with their own past. For every quarter we take what they traded in the same quarter of the three years before: that is their usual. A trade is unusual when it is far from that, for example a CFO who sells every February selling four times as much in August, or a CEO buying for the first time in years. This idea follows research by Cohen, Malloy and Pomorski (Journal of Finance, 2012), who found that routine insider trades predict little and unusual ones a lot more.

Two or more insiders buying (or selling) the same stock in the same period. Funds and 10% owners don't count, because one investment group often files under several names.

From 0 to 100, for purchases only: who bought (CEO or CFO score highest), how many dollars, how much it adds to their stake, whether other insiders bought too, and whether they bought more than once. Tiny buys and buys that barely change a stake are marked as noise.

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Every filing comes from the SEC's public EDGAR database, and every row links to the original Form 4. InsiderStakes is information, not investment advice.

No. InsiderStakes describes SEC filings: who traded, how much, and whether the trade looks routine (option cash-outs, pre-set plans, tax sales) or not. Everyone who follows a stock sees the same thing. We don't know your finances and don't tell anyone to buy or sell. “Not routine” means a trade is worth reading about, not that you should act on it.