Methodology
How the signals are scored
Everything on InsiderIntent is computed from public filings, shown with its evidence, and held to a statistical bar before we claim anything. Here is the whole method, in plain language.
The two-axis read
Every signal carries two separate scores, and they answer different questions.
Notability asks: how unusual is this move?A CEO's first-ever open-market buy, an executive selling most of their stake outside any scheduled plan, five insiders buying the same name in the same week — these are measurably out of the ordinary. Notability is deterministic and auditable: it's computed from the filing itself, so it exists the day the filing lands.
Validation asks a harder question: has this TYPE of signal actually predicted anything? That claim has to be earned, and earning it takes three things: enough similar trades to measure, a correction for multiple testing (we test many signal types, so some will look good by pure luck — we correct for that), and evidence on data the rule never saw.
When a signal card says validation is “not yet earned,”that means the bar is working — not that the signal is worthless. An unusual move can be worth your attention on its unusualness alone; we just won't pretend it carries a proven edge before it does.
Where the data comes from
Public regulatory and government sources, spanning every category of informed-money activity — not one feed, and not a pile of unrelated datasets, but the full picture of who is positioned where:
- Insider trades — SEC Forms 3/4/5 (corporate-insider transactions), Form 144 (proposed sales), and 10b5-1 plan adoptions.
- Institutional positioning — 13F holdings and their quarter-over-quarter changes, 13D/13G stakes (activist and passive, as a share of class), and NPORT-P monthly fund books (including shorts and options).
- Congress — Senate eFD and House Clerk member-trade disclosures.
- Corporate actions & catalysts — buyback 8-Ks, share issuance, exec/board changes, M&A, PIPEs, tender offers, Form D, and HSR filings.
- Short-side positioning — FINRA daily short volume and bi-monthly short interest, plus fails-to-deliver.
- Fundamentals & context — SEC XBRL company facts back to 2009, plus government context: federal contract awards, lobbying, clinical trials, and SEC enforcement.
Prices are a multi-source composite (Tiingo primary, with automatic failover). Every figure on the site links back to the filing it came from — we call these the receipts. If you can't click through to the source, we don't show the number.
How signals are scored
Each filing is checked against a library of signal patterns — the recurring shapes that make informed-actor activity meaningful. Among them:
- Out of character — a trade unusual for this specific actor: first buy ever, ten times their normal size, a break from years of routine.
- Meaningful exits — sales that reduce a real fraction of a stake, outside any pre-set trading plan. A scheduled plan sale is the anti-story; a discretionary exit is the story.
- Clusters of buyers — multiple insiders at the same company buying in a tight window.
- Buying the dip — insiders stepping in while their own stock is drawn down.
- Crowded-short setups — insider buying into a heavily shorted name.
- Cross-source agreement — independent source types converging on the same name, weighted by how surprising the agreement is (below).
When a pattern fires, the card shows its evidence in words — who did what, how much, and the specific fact that makes it unusual — not a bare score you have to take on faith.
Cross-source convergence
When independent source types — say, corporate insiders and an institutional 13F — agree on the same name, that canbe one of the strongest reads available. But agreement is only interesting when it's surprising. So we measure how often that agreement would happen by chance, given each source's own lean: if a fund holds half the market and insiders buy broadly, overlap is expected and means little. Convergence is scored by how far the agreement sits from what chance alone would produce.
The InsiderIntent Index
The index on our public page is the weekly bullish share of directional informed-money disclosures filed that week — corporate insiders (Form 4 and related notices), members of Congress, institutional position disclosures (13F/13D/G), and issuer actions (buybacks, offerings). It counts breadth of filings, not dollars: insider dollar volume is structurally sell-heavy (compensation flow), so the informative signal is the shift in the buy/sell mix. A week's reading is final the moment the week ends — we bucket by filing date, never by trade date, so a number you cite today cannot quietly change tomorrow. The current reading is framed against the index's own trailing-year range because the level alone means little; the deviation is the read. Weeks with too few filings or incomplete source coverage are excluded rather than guessed. Only public-domain filings are counted, no price data is involved, and no model touches the number — it is arithmetic over disclosures, reproducible by anyone.
What we refuse to do
This product exists because most of this category is hype dressed as signal. The refusals are the method.
- No forecasts or price targets. We tell you what informed actors did and how unusual it is. We do not predict where a stock is going.
- No AI-generated numbers. Every figure on the site is computed deterministically from filings and linked to its source. The AI writes the words around the numbers; it never produces one.
- No copy-trading or position sizing. We are an information tool. We will not tell you what to buy, how much, or when to sell.
- No cherry-picked win rates. “442% in 30 days” is the genre we exist against. A track record that only shows the winners is marketing, not evidence.
- No blended magic score. How unusual a move is and whether its signal type has proven predictive are different questions. We show the two axes separately, always — collapsing them into one number hides exactly what you need to know.
- No edge claims before the statistical bar. We do not publish a performance number for a signal type until it survives our full statistical process — enough samples, multiple-testing correction, out-of-sample evidence. That is also why you don't see one today.
Our own track record
The standard applies to us too. The product scores its own surfaced signals by the same method it applies to everything else, and we will publish that record — hits, misses, and the honest nulls — once it clears the same statistical bar we hold every signal type to. That surface is being built; it ships when it's earned, not before.
InsiderIntent is an information tool. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security.
See the method on live filings: the public signal board.