We wanted to get a better idea of what the full landscape of insider trading data from the SEC looks like and we found the following; since January 2019 there have been 6,296,206 forms filed with the SEC, with 480 unique form types.

As you can see by far the most common form type is the Form 4. This makes a lot of sense as Form 4’s are filed every time an insider trades their company’s stock. We were somewhat surprised to see Form 424B2 being the second most common. This is a more complex form, but the general idea is it includes information about new securities a company is issuing.

Something we really wanted to dig into was the “seasonality” of insider trading. There are very clear spikes and dips in the number of trades being filed, but it is more consistent than we expected, especially with form 4s. When you get deeper into Form 4 data you will quickly find that a huge number of trades are on trading plans and these happen all throughout the year. There is some more complexity to these, as the insider has more control over their preset trading plan then you might think, but that is a topic for another day. The thing we really wanted to see was the famous “earnings season”

Often you will hear about “earnings season” when lots of quarterly reports are being filed. We expected to see 4 distinct spikes each year in the 10-Qs (quarterly reports), but ultimately we did not find any. Sure there are spikes, but clearly there are 10-Qs coming out all year round. Now it is worth noting that this dataset includes every single SEC filing from every publicly traded company, not just the largest 500 or so you typically hear about in the news.

10-Ks (annual reports) were even more interesting as they are fairly distributed throughout the year. While major companies may end up doing them around the same time, there are thousands of companies doing them at other times which clearly do not get as much attention.

Clearly insider trading is happening all the time. There are spikes, but every month there are important things happening in the world of insiders. If you want to follow Form 4s there is no better place then Insiderviz, and who knows we might soon have 13Fs, 10-Qs, 10-Ks, and more…

*Some filings are reported multiple times, once for each reporter