Methodology

Everything below is how the numbers on this site and on @followfilings actually get calculated — written down so it's checkable, not just asserted.

What counts as a notable call

A Form 4 open-market purchase (code P) gets named in a post or earns a ticker page on the Ledger when it crosses one of these thresholds:

  • Officers and directors: $200,000 or more in a single filing.
  • Any other reporting owner (10% owners, funds, etc.): $1,000,000 or more.
  • Or: the ticker has been named in a post for any other reason (a cluster buy, an accumulation streak, a notable sell).

    • Once a ticker has a Ledger page, that page shows every real transaction we've captured for it — not just the ones that crossed the threshold. The threshold decides which tickers get a page, not what shows on the page once it exists.

    Form 4 transaction codes

    The SEC codes every transaction line on a Form 4. We only ever call something a buy if the code is P. The rest are compensation mechanics, not conviction, and we label them as such:

  • P — open-market purchase. Their own cash. This is the signal.
  • S — open-market sale.
  • A — grant or award. Given to them, usually at $0 cost. Not a buy.
  • M or X — exercising options they already held.
  • F — shares withheld to cover taxes, usually right after an M.
  • G — gift.
  • C — conversion (e.g. share class conversion).
  • J — other / not elsewhere classified.

    • Accumulation streaks

    A streak is an insider buying (code P) on distinct trading days with no more than a 3-calendar-day gap between them — wide enough to bridge a normal weekend, not wide enough to call two unrelated purchases weeks apart a "streak." It's counted by trade date, not by transaction line — a single large purchase executed in many lots on one day is one buying day, not a multi-day streak. We only post a streak while it's still active: the most recent buy in it has to be within the last 10 days, so this is never a dig through old history presented as something happening now.

    Win rate and average return

    The win-rate and average-return stats on the Ledger are computed only from posts whose text contains "bought" — sell mentions are tracked for reference but never counted as a win or a loss, since we don't have a position either way on a sell. Both numbers are live, floating marks: recalculated from the current price every time the site rebuilds, not a fixed holding-period return. A call posted an hour ago and a call posted three months ago are both marked at today's price, averaged together with equal weight.

    Data sources

  • Insider transactions, all of it: SEC EDGAR, directly. The daily filing index plus each Form 4's own XML. Nothing here is third-party.
  • Company earnings/revenue trend: SEC's XBRL company-facts API — the company's own reported numbers, pulled from their actual 10-Qs/10-Ks.
  • Business descriptions, institutional ownership (13F-derived), and annual financials for companies without SEC quarterly data (mostly foreign private issuers): Yahoo Finance. Always labeled "via Yahoo Finance" wherever it appears — a different sourcing standard than the SEC-direct data, and never presented as if it were SEC-sourced.
  • Prices: Yahoo Finance's public chart data, refreshed on each site rebuild.

    • See corrections for known issues we've found and fixed.

    “Insiders sell for a hundred reasons. They only buy for one.”