Insider buying cluster alerts
The most reliable insider signal isn't a single buy — it's a cluster: multiple insiders at the same company buying within a short window. It's also one of the hardest things to monitor manually. Tickerbot watches every Form 4 filing across 12,000+ tickers and surfaces clusters the moment they form.
Why clusters are the only insider signal that matters
A single insider buy is noisy. Could be a planned vesting purchase, could be symbolic. A cluster — three or four insiders buying within thirty days — is different. It usually means the people closest to the business are seeing something the market hasn't priced in yet.
Academic studies consistently find that clusters of insider buys outperform the market over the following 6 to 12 months. Single buys mostly don't.
Why this is hard to monitor without automation
Form 4 filings hit the SEC EDGAR system in real time, but you'd need to:
- Watch every Form 4 across thousands of tickers
- Group filings by ticker and rolling time window
- Filter out 10b5-1 plan transactions (which are pre-scheduled, not discretionary)
- Filter out option exercises (which aren't real "buys")
- Surface only the clusters that meet your threshold
Tickerbot ingests SEC Form 4 filings and tags each transaction by type, insider role, and discretionary status — automatically.
Filtering for higher-conviction signals
The signal gets even stronger when you filter by role and exclude planned transactions. CEO and CFO buys are the most watched, and open-market discretionary purchases are the only ones that signal real conviction.
Common variations you can build
- Insider buying clusters in any small-cap under $2B market cap
- Multiple insider buys on a stock that's also down more than 20% YTD
- Single CEO open-market buy of more than $1M in any ticker
- Insider buying cluster on a stock with a recent analyst downgrade (insider/analyst disagreement)
Related alerts
Other insider and fundamental alerts that work well together