AlphaYouInsider Form 4 filings
Understand reported insider ownership changes, what Form 4 records, and why transaction context matters before it becomes research context.
Insider Form 4s since April 2026
16,927 Form 4 transactions from 10,534 people across 3,330 companies. 12,941 were sales and 3,986 were purchases, about 3.2 sales for every purchase. That ratio is normal and is not a bearish signal: insiders are paid in stock and sell for many reasons, while an open-market purchase costs them their own money. It is the reason the purchase side is worth counting separately.
Most insiders buying the same company
Last six months, counting separate people rather than separate filings, and only where the buying was spread out rather than bunched. A grant or a company purchase programme can put twenty insiders on the tape at once, which is not the same thing as twenty people choosing to buy.
Where insiders bought
Open-market purchases by sector over the same six months, with the number of distinct companies behind each count.
| Sector | Purchases | Companies |
|---|---|---|
| Financial Services | 720 | 259 |
| Healthcare | 615 | 221 |
| Industrials | 354 | 140 |
| Technology | 294 | 115 |
| Consumer Cyclical | 261 | 102 |
| Energy | 256 | 53 |
An insider has two business days to report a transaction, and they mostly use them: across every Form 4 above, the median gap between the transaction and the filing was 2 calendar days, and 63.9% arrived within two calendar days. These are calendar days, so a trade made on a Friday counts against the weekend - the figure describes how fast disclosure reaches you, not whether a filer met the deadline.
Guides in this hub
2 published- 015 min read
Do Corporate Insiders Really Beat the Market? What the Research Shows
The academic answer is a qualified yes, but only for purchases, only modestly, and mostly in smaller companies. Lakonishok and Lee, Jeng Metrick and Zeckhauser, and what a third of Form 4s being pre-scheduled does to the signal.
- 025 min read
What Is a Form 4 Filing? How to Read Insider Trading Disclosures
A plain-English guide to SEC Form 4 filings - what they are, the 2-business-day rule, and why roughly a third of insider transactions are pre-scheduled and tell you nothing about what an executive currently thinks.