Following the Smart Money
Insiders sell for a hundred reasons — taxes, a new house, just diversifying. They buy their own stock for exactly one: they think it's going higher. An open-market insider BUY is the highest-conviction signal a company can give you, it's public the day it's filed, and almost nobody is watching it in time.
Ignore the sells — they're noise. The signal is an open-market PURCHASE by someone who knows the business from the inside. They're spending their own money on the same stock you're deciding whether to own.
A CEO or CFO stepping in with their own cash outranks a board member. The people closest to the numbers buying ahead of everyone else — that's conviction you can't fake on a Form 4.
One insider buying is an opinion. Three of them buying the same name in the same window is a message. Watch for the cluster — it's the difference between a hunch and a tell.
The SEC posts every Form 4, but by the time it's a headline the move is half gone. We surface it the day it hits, score it, then show you what it actually did after a lockup — so you know the signal is real, not a lucky story.
Insider buying is free public data — and nearly useless by the time you'd normally see it. Pulling it the day it files, scoring it, and tracking it honestly is one edge. It isn't the only one. That's the point.