Short answer first. Insiders sell far more than they buy, and it means less than it looks. Our database holds 9,060 insider trades filed on Form 4 between April 2023 and October 2026: 1,890 purchases against 7,170 sales, and $2.77 billion of buying against $15.28 billion of selling. That four-to-one skew is the permanent shape of insider data, in earnings season and out of it.
The census
| Measure | Count | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Trades in the database | 9,060 | Form 4 filings, April 2023 to October 2026 |
| Buys | 1,890 (21%) | $2.77 billion in value |
| Sells | 7,170 (79%) | $15.28 billion in value |
| Companies covered | 1,414 tickers | 2,753 individual insiders |
Most insider selling is housekeeping: executives are paid in stock, so they sell on schedules, diversify, and cover taxes, none of which requires a view on the quarter. Purchases are the opposite. An open-market buy spends the insider's own money at the market price, which is why the buy side of this table is the side worth reading, and why our signal guide weights buys so heavily. The earnings hubs this page is modeled on count reports; this census counts what the people inside the companies did around them.
The skew, drawn
Who is filing matters too. Where the form records a title, directors account for 1,041 trades, 10 percent owners for 615, chief financial officers for 255, and chief executives who also sit on the board for 197. The closer the filer sits to the numbers, the more a purchase reads as information rather than housekeeping, which is why the same dollar amount means different things from a CFO and from an outside director. Speed is the other asymmetry: the median insider filing in this database arrived two days after the trade, the SEC's two-business-day rule made visible, while congressional disclosures in our companion census took a median of 28 days.
The practical use is calibration. A single insider sale at a company you own is noise inside a 7,170-sale database; a purchase lands in a set one quarter the size, and a cluster of purchases lands in a set smaller still, which is the subject of the companion census on this site. The Insider Sentiment Gauge runs the same buy and sell counts ticker by ticker, so the market-wide skew can be compared with the picture at any single company before its print.
Sources: hub form modeled on Yahoo Finance, Earnings Reports, Whispers & Company Earnings News. All counts from this site's insider trades database (9,060 Form 4 records), computed November 5, 2026.