Why We Track Insider Buying

Corporate insiders file their transactions publicly, on a deadline, under penalty of law. That makes insider activity one of the few genuinely privileged datasets that everyone is allowed to read. The trick is knowing which filings carry information and which are administrative exhaust.

Selling is ambiguous; buying is not

Insiders sell to diversify, to exercise expiring options, to pay taxes, to fund a divorce, or because a pre-scheduled plan said so. Sales are usually uninformative. Open-market purchases are different: an executive spending their own after-tax cash to increase exposure to a company they already depend on for a salary is expressing one opinion — that the stock is worth more than it costs.

What makes a purchase worth flagging

• ✓Open-market buys, not option exercises or plan-scheduled acquisitions.
• ✓Size that's meaningful relative to the insider's existing stake and compensation.
• ✓Cluster buying — several insiders in the same window is far stronger than one.
• ✓Buys that break a long personal pattern of not buying.

When a setup card in the terminal shows insider flags, this is what's behind them: recent filings scored on those criteria, not a raw count of transactions. Two meaningful flags on a name with confirming price action and options flow is a very different situation than two routine filings on a quiet chart.

No single dataset makes a trade. Insider buying is a slow, sturdy signal — it tells you where conviction lives, and the rest of the stack tells you when the market starts to agree.