Updated September 9, 2026.
The United States is one of the easier markets to follow, because the disclosure is fast and it is genuinely public. Every reportable trade lands in EDGAR, the SEC's filing system, within two business days, and anyone can read it for free. There is no paywall between you and the raw filing.
That register is the foundation. What a service can add is the connection back to the stock: is the company healthy, is the trend pointing up, and what happened to the price afterwards. That is the part we do.
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1. The trade | An officer, a director or an owner of more than 10 % buys or sells shares in the company. |
| 2. The filing | Within two business days of the trade date it is reported to the SEC on a Form 4. |
| 3. Publication | The filing becomes visible in EDGAR, open to everyone, as soon as it is accepted. |
| 4. Our import | We read the Form 4 feed daily through our market-data provider, match the filer to the stock and store the trade. |
| 5. On the stock page | You see net bought or sold over the last three months, who traded, and all of it next to our verdict on the stock. |
What we filter out — and why: the SEC uses a transaction code on every line. We show the open-market purchases and sales and leave out grants, option exercises and shares withheld to cover tax. An executive who receives shares as part of their pay has not made a decision about the price; an executive who buys with their own money has. The filter makes the signal smaller in count and stronger in content.
The honest answer: it is a piece of the puzzle, not a verdict. What makes it interesting is the asymmetry. A purchase really has only one explanation — the person believes the stock is worth more than the price. A sale can be explained by ten things that have nothing to do with the company: taxes, a house, a divorce, or simply spreading their own risk. That is why buying weighs more than selling, and why a single sale should not be read as a warning sign.
The pattern is visible in our own data. Over the last twelve months we recorded 11,263 acquisitions against 25,091 disposals on US stocks — selling is simply the normal state when a large part of executive pay arrives as stock. That is exactly why a sale carries little information on its own, and why several independent buys in the same company within a short time is the version worth noticing.
Two caveats always apply: management can be wrong about their own company — it happens often — and a purchase says nothing about timing. An insider buy is one argument among several, never a reason to buy on its own.
We hold 218,007 reported transactions on 631 US stocks. The record reaches back to 2000, but it only becomes dense from 2019 — there are 11,764 rows for that year against 1,995 for 2014, so a comparison further back than that is thin rather than wrong. Going forward it updates every day.
If you want the complete history for a single company, EDGAR itself is the right place. If you want the insider trading as one of several pieces in a single view per stock — together with value, quality, trend and a stop level — that is what our stock pages do.
The source is the SEC. Officers, directors and owners of more than 10 % of a company must report every trade in their own company on a Form 4, and the filing is public on EDGAR the moment it lands. You can read EDGAR directly for free. What a service adds is the link back to the stock: WallStreetBuys imports the Form 4 filings every day and shows the buying and selling on each US stock page, so you see it next to the rest of the picture instead of as a list on its own.
In the SEC's EDGAR system, where every Form 4 sits with the name, the company, the date, the number of shares and the price. If you would rather see it per stock — and at the same time see whether the company stands strong on the numbers — the insider trades are on every US stock page here, with net bought or sold over the last three months and who did the trading.
Within two business days of the transaction date, on a Form 4. That deadline runs from the trade date, not from settlement. Two other forms exist: a Form 3 when someone first becomes an insider (within 10 days), and a Form 5 after the fiscal year ends (within 45 days), which only has to be filed when there was at least one reportable transaction. All of them are filed electronically through EDGAR and are public.
It is one piece of the puzzle, not an answer. What makes it interesting is the asymmetry: a purchase really has only one explanation — the person thinks the stock is worth more than the price. A sale can be explained by ten things that have nothing to do with the company: taxes, a house, a divorce, or simply spreading their own risk. That is why buying weighs more than selling, and why a single sale should not be read as a warning. The strongest version is several independent buys in the same company within a short time.
It is a trading plan set up in advance, so the trades happen on a schedule rather than on a decision made that day. Since the rules were tightened in December 2022, a director or officer cannot start trading under a new plan until the later of 90 days after adopting it or two business days after the company reports results for that quarter — and Forms 4 and 5 now carry a checkbox showing the trade was made under such a plan. It matters for how you read it: a scheduled sale says much less about what the person thinks today than an unplanned one.
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This is information, not individual investment advice. The numbers are our own calculations on market data and may contain errors. Past results are no guarantee of the future. You decide for yourself — and remember to spread your risk.