SEC Form 4 · Daily

The people who know the most are required to tell you what they bought.

Officers and directors must report trades in their own company's stock within two business days. Tens of thousands of those filings a year are procedural noise. We strip that out and send you the handful that are worth a second look.

Form 4 — example formatIllustrative

Chief Executive Officer Open-market purchase, own funds

+42,000 sh Buy

Chief Financial Officer Open-market purchase, same week

+15,500 sh Buy

Director Scheduled 10b5-1 plan sale

−8,000 sh Filtered

Two independent open-market buys in one week is worth reading. The planned sale is not — it was arranged months ago. That distinction is the whole job.

The Filter

Most insider activity means nothing

Treating every Form 4 as a signal is the most common mistake in this corner of financial media. The work is in throwing filings away.

Worth reading

Discretionary buying

Open-market purchases. Own money, market price, no discount — a position that only pays off if the business does.
Cluster activity. Several insiders buying independently within days. Much harder to explain as a personal financial decision.
Size against holding. A purchase that meaningfully increases what someone already owns, or a large fraction of their pay.
Buying into weakness. Purchases after a fall, when the easy choice was to wait.

Filtered out

Procedural activity

10b5-1 plan sales. Arranged months ahead, executed automatically. Says little about what the seller thinks today.
Option exercises. Compensation converted to cash, not a view on valuation.
Tax withholding. Shares surrendered automatically on vesting. The insider never chose to sell.
Grants and awards. Someone was paid in stock. That is a payroll event.

The Asymmetry

Selling is noisy. Buying is harder to explain away.

01 / SELLING

A hundred innocent reasons

A house, a tax bill, a divorce, or simply owning too much of one company. Selling tells you about someone's life at least as often as their view of the business.

02 / BUYING

Essentially one

Nobody buys more of their employer's stock, at market price, with money they already have, unless they expect it to be worth more. It is not proof — but it is different.

03 / LIMITS

Insiders are often wrong

Executives are optimistic about their own companies by disposition. Plenty buy all the way down. A filing is a data point, never a conclusion.

Method

How a filing earns a write-up

Filter

Remove plan sales, option exercises, withholding, and grants. A small fraction survives.

Weigh

Size the trade against the insider's existing position, their pay, and their trading history.

Corroborate

Check whether anyone else at the company did the same thing in the same window.

Explain

Set it against what was happening at the business — results, guidance, or a fallen price.

Everything we publish is a public filing

No rumours, no unfiled information, nothing sourced from someone's private knowledge of a company. Trading on material non-public information is a crime, and this publication has no interest in being anywhere near it. If it is not on EDGAR, it is not in the brief.