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"Follow the insiders" is one of the most repeated ideas in retail investing. There's been a lot of studies published linking insider purchases to excess returns and there's good reasoning why it should work. Afterall company executives have the best insight into their own company's performance and as Peter Lynch said "Insiders might sell their shares for any number of reasons, but they buy them for only one: they think the price will rise". I'm particularly interested in the direct purchase transactions, when insiders buy their own stock on open market with their own money. I ran a number of queries to test if simply following those insider trades allows you to beat the market. Important methodology notes first. I built my own database for tracking insider trades and this is where I source my data from. I fetch transaction data from sec-api and use financial data APIs to source prices and additional context for each transaction. I used it to grab every open-market insider purchase filed since January 2025. Then I compared each one to SPY across multiple holding windows. 9,000 purchases across 2,008 tickers, about 16 months of data. One thing that matters a lot and most research doe

27 pts · 11 comments · u/petey_cash · 2026-04-28 15:01 UTC