Insider filings are the most direct disclosure there is of what the people running a company are doing with their own money. Every one of them is free. Reading them correctly is the part nobody documents — here are the two filters that separate a decision from a vesting schedule.
Officers, directors and holders of more than 10% of a company's stock must report changes in their holdings to the SEC within two business days, on Form 4. Form 3 is the initial statement when someone becomes an insider; Form 5 is an annual catch-up. Each filing names the issuer, the insider and their role, and lists transactions: date, code, shares, price and holdings afterwards.
| Code | Meaning | A decision? |
|---|---|---|
| P | Open-market or private purchase | Yes — the insider chose to buy with their own money |
| S | Open-market or private sale | Sometimes — often a scheduled 10b5-1 plan |
| A | Grant or award | No — set by the compensation committee |
| M | Option exercise | No — follows a vesting schedule |
| F | Shares withheld to pay tax | No — mechanical |
| G | Gift | No |
Of 2,317,601 transactions in the filings since 2019, just 218,895 carry code P. Codes A, F and M outnumber P by about five to one and run on schedules set years earlier. Aggregate without filtering and you are mostly measuring the payroll calendar.
Affiliated funds and general partners co-file the same transaction under separate owner rows. A naive sum of dollar values counts one purchase two or three times. Every figure on this site counts each filing once.
An insider may trade on Monday and file on Wednesday. The trade date tells you what they knew; the filing date tells you when you could have known. Every chart here plots the filing date.
All of this is built in — the Filings Browser shows only decisions, the daily report lists yesterday's, and the schema page documents the three tables the data ships as.
All seven tools, the full two-year feed, the JSON API and email alerts, refreshed every morning. A free quarterly sample of the dataset needs no account.
See plansFree sampleThe form officers, directors and 10% holders file within two business days of a change in their holdings of the company's stock. It lists each transaction with its date, code, shares, price and holdings afterwards.
An open-market or private purchase — the insider chose to buy shares with their own money. It is the only code that is unambiguously a decision.
Because codes A, M and F follow vesting schedules and tax rules set years earlier. They say nothing about what the insider thinks of today's price, and they outnumber real purchases five to one.
Usually not. Executives sell for diversification, taxes and pre-arranged plans. Insiders buy for one reason and sell for many, which is why the buying carries the information.
The daily insider buying report on this blog lists them free every morning; the members area has the full feed with charts and alerts.