Does following insiders actually work?
We took every open-market insider purchase on file, marked the price on the day the filing went public — the moment an alert would fire — and measured what the stock did next. Then we did the same for the S&P 500 over the identical dates, so you can see the edge beyond a rising market.
Up one month later
56%
Share of insider buys trading above the filing-day price after ~21 trading days
Beat the S&P 500
50%
Share that outperformed the index over the same one-month window
Average excess return
+3.0%
Mean one-month return above the S&P 500, per signal
By size of the buy
Bigger checks tend to carry more conviction. Win rate = % of signals above the filing-day price; Beat S&P = % that also outran the index.
| Buy size | Signals | Up @1D | Up @1W | Up @1M | Beat S&P @1M | Avg excess @1M |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $10K-50K | 4,501 | 60% | 58% | 55% | 47% | +2.2% |
| $50K-250K | 4,165 | 66% | 62% | 58% | 50% | +2.3% |
| $250K-1M | 1,861 | 70% | 65% | 59% | 54% | +4.5% |
| $1M+ | 1,526 | 68% | 65% | 55% | 49% | +5.1% |
| All buys | 12,053 | 65% | 61% | 56% | 50% | +3.0% |
How we measured this
- Signals: open-market purchases only (Form 4 code
P, shares acquired) — grants, option exercises, and gifts are excluded. Minimum trade value $10K. - Entry: the adjusted closing price on the first trading day on or after the filing became public — i.e. the price you could realistically act on when an alert fires, not the insider's (earlier, non-public) trade date.
- Windows: +1, +5 (≈1 week), and +21 (≈1 month) trading days, using split/dividend-adjusted closes throughout.
- Benchmark: the S&P 500 (SPY) measured over the exact same dates; “excess” is the stock's return minus the index's.
- Coverage: based on 12,053 signals across 2,107 tickers, 2025-01-02 to 2026-04-28. Signals on tickers without price coverage (e.g. since-delisted names) are excluded, which can introduce survivorship bias.
Past performance does not guarantee future results. This is research, not investment advice.
