Stats › Options, shorts and positioning › Insider transactions
Corporate insider buying and selling
Company executives and directors have to tell the regulator when they buy or sell shares in their own company. That disclosure is public, which means anybody can add it all up and watch what the people closest to a business are doing with their own money. It's an appealing idea, and it comes with a headline that reappears every few months: insiders are dumping stock.
This page has the actual figures for the first half of 2026, both sides of the ledger, plus an explanation of why the selling number is always enormous compared with the buying number. Most of that explanation comes down to how senior executives get paid, which is a detail the headlines almost never include and which changes the meaning of the whole statistic. It also summarises two well cited academic papers on whether any of this predicts anything, because that question has actually been studied properly, and the answer is narrower and a good deal less dramatic than the coverage suggests.
The short version, which I'll spoil now rather than make you scroll: buying and selling are not mirror images of each other, and only one of them has ever carried much information. Sources are listed at the bottom with dates, and one of them has an attribution quirk I've flagged in the notes rather than quietly tidied away. Read them yourself before you build anything on this.
US corporate insiders sold $77.6 billion of stock in the first half of 2026, up 20% year on year and the second fastest pace in over twenty years. They bought $6.9 billion, a sell to buy ratio of roughly 11 to 1. That ratio looks alarming and is close to normal, because insiders receive stock as compensation and must sell to diversify. The academic finding that matters is narrower: insider buying predicts returns and insider selling does not.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart and 4 named sources, roughly 1400 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
You can keep browsing every statistic in the library for free. The intro and the summary are always open.