Insider Buying — Who Bought With Their Own Money
The problem with every free insider table
Executives and directors have to report their trades to the SEC within two business days. That data is public, and plenty of sites will show it to you as a table.
The table is misleading, because it puts four completely different things in one list:
- Shares they bought with their own money at the market price
- Shares they were handed as compensation
- Shares taken back automatically to cover the tax on that compensation
- Shares sold through a plan they filed months or years earlier
Only the first one means anyone decided anything. But a raw table can show a company where the CEO bought $2 million as "net selling", because payday and tax withholding drowned it out.
This agent separates them, and shows you the result as charts.
You get four views, every run
How many bought around the same time
| Buyers in one window | Days apart | Read |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | 7 | More than one buyer, close together |
What the filings actually were
| Type | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Bought with own money | 3 | 60% |
| Sold | 1 | 20% |
| Pay, tax, options | 1 | 20% |
Who bought, by amount
| Insider | Role | Amount | Share of their holding |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cook Timothy | Chief Executive Officer | $2.5M | +6.7% |
| Parekh Kevan | Chief Financial Officer | $856K | +9.8% |
| Levinson Arthur | Director | $320K | +1.7% |
Bought vs sold, by month
| Month | Bought | Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-07 | $0 | $5.1M — all pre-scheduled |
| 2026-08 | $3.7M | $0 |
That last table is the point. A free table would call this net selling. The July sale was arranged a year in advance, and in August three insiders bought with their own money.
Same shape every run, so you can compare this month against last.
Then the written report
- The short answer — buying, selling, or neither, in two sentences
- Who bought — name, job, date, and how much it grew their stake
- How unusual is this — several buyers close together, or one person alone
- What wasn't actually buying — the pay and the tax, counted separately
- The selling — and how much was arranged in advance
- Who is doing it — a CFO buying is not the same as a board member buying
- What this doesn't tell you — stated plainly, not buried
- The filings — dates and reference numbers, so you can open the originals
Why "several at once" is the part to look at
One executive buying is one person's opinion.
Four buying within three weeks is four people who read the same internal reports arriving at the same conclusion. That distinction is the most useful thing in this data, and it is exactly what a table of individual rows makes hardest to see.
Scope and limits
- US-listed companies only. This is SEC data.
- Default window is the last six months, adjustable up to several years.
- Filings arrive up to two business days after the trade. The price has usually moved by then.
- Insiders are often early — buying a year before a recovery is common, and so is buying before a further decline.
- No buying at all means very little on its own. Many executives never buy on the open market because they already hold shares from grants.
- Every figure comes from the filings. Nothing is estimated.
What this does not do
- It does not tell you to buy or sell anything. It reports what insiders did.
- It does not predict prices, set targets, or rate stocks.
- It does not value the company or read its financial statements.
- It does not screen the market for ideas. You bring the ticker.
- It has no access to anything private. Every source is a public SEC filing you can open yourself.
