Insider Intelligence — What Executives Do With Their Own Stock

Insider transactions from SEC Form 4 filings: open-market buys and sells, anomaly detection, buying clusters and a link to the original filing.

What an insider filing is

Executives, directors and major holders of a US public company must report every change in their holdings to the SEC, generally within two trading days. That report is Form 4, and it is public from the moment it is filed.

The practical consequence is that you can see exactly what the people who know the company best actually did. It is one of the few inputs in the market that is neither commentary nor forecast, but a record of an action already taken.

Why most "sales" are not sales

Form 4 reports far more than buying and selling. It also records stock granted as pay, options exercised, gifts, and shares handed back to the company to cover tax on a vesting. All of it appears as an acquisition or a disposal, and most of it is not a decision to buy or sell at all.

The most common case is code F — shares withheld to pay tax when an award vests. It is automatic and scheduled in advance, and in a raw feed it still looks like an executive selling a large block of stock.

Of the transactions ingested here so far, only a minority are open-market buying and selling. The rest is compensation and option mechanics. VAQO classifies every transaction by its SEC code and computes every headline figure on open-market activity alone.

What makes activity unusual

A large transaction is not automatically an unusual one; it depends on who made it and what they normally do. A million-dollar purchase is routine for someone who buys at that size every quarter, and remarkable for someone who has not bought on the open market in three years.

So the comparison is against that person's own history, against the company's history, and against how much their position actually moved. Where there is not enough history to compare with, we say so rather than showing a score that looks certain.

Buying clusters

Several different insiders buying into the same company inside a short window is a rarer event than a single purchase, so it is measured separately. Five transactions by one person are not a cluster; three different people are.

What matters as much is what it does not say: the data shows transactions happened close together in time, not that the buyers arranged it between them. A Form 4 records what was filed and when.

Last updated: 2026-09-27