Where the data comes from
Officers, directors, and owners of more than 10% of a company's stock must report their trades in that stock to the SEC on Form 4, generally within two business days. Trabud reads those filings from SEC EDGAR, the SEC's public filing system, as they are accepted. The transactions themselves come only from the filings — none are entered by hand. Company sector and market-cap labels are added from a market-data provider.
“Form 4 must be filed within two business days following the transaction date.”
— SEC Investor Bulletin: Insider Transactions and Forms 3, 4, and 5
Which transactions count
Trabud keeps a Form 4 when it reports at least one purchase or sale of non-derivative stock — transaction code P (“open market or private purchase”) or S (“open market or private sale”) in the SEC's Form 4 instructions. Those are the trades where an insider chose to put money in or take it out.
Not counted:
- stock grants and awards (code A)
- option exercises and conversions (codes M and C)
- shares withheld to pay taxes (code F)
- gifts (code G)
- filings that report only derivative securities, such as options
A filing that pairs an option exercise with a same-day sale is kept, and only its sale counts.
How each record is built
One Form 4 becomes one record. When a filing reports several purchase or sale lines — common when an order fills at different prices — Trabud nets them: shares bought minus shares sold, and dollars bought minus dollars sold, where each line's dollar value is its reported shares times its reported price. A positive net is a buy, a negative net a sell, and a filing whose purchases and sales cancel out exactly is dropped. The average price shown is net dollars divided by net shares.
The date shown is when the SEC accepted the filing — usually one or two business days after the trade itself, later if the insider filed late. Every record keeps a link to the filing as the SEC renders it; the “SEC ↗” link on each row opens it.
Who the insider is
Insiders are identified by the SEC's own filer ID, the CIK — never by name. Names are unreliable keys: in our data, over a thousand filers appear under more than one spelling, and dozens of different filers share a name. Display names come from a canonical name table that turns the SEC's “LAST FIRST” ordering into readable form and follows renamed entities.
Funds and their affiliates often file one Form 4 together. Those filings are shown under the lead filer with a +N badge for the co-filers; a count such as “+9+” means the stored list of co-filer names reached its length limit, so the true number may be higher. Counts labelled “insider filers” count filers, not people: a fund filing jointly with its affiliates is one filer.
Which company a trade belongs to
Each filing is tied to the issuing company by its CIK, which is resolved to the company's current ticker, so a ticker that has changed hands shows only the current holder's filings. Sector labels use Morningstar's sector names, supplied by a market-data provider and cached per company; filings with no known sector appear on company pages but on no sector page.
Data-quality filters
A few filings contain typing errors in the price or share count, and because value is shares times price, one bad field can produce a “trade” worth trillions. Trabud treats two patterns as impossible and removes their price and value:
- a price above $10,000 per share on a trade worth more than $1 billion
- any single trade worth more than $50 billion
No listed U.S. stock trades above about $10,000 a share except Berkshire Hathaway Class A, whose insider trades are far below $1 billion, and the largest genuine single-insider trade in Trabud's data is about $14 billion. When the rule was introduced it was checked against all 358,000 filings then on record and removed no genuine trade.
Which pages exist
A page is only worth publishing when there is enough history behind it to be useful, so every family of pages has a floor:
- Company pages for companies with at least 8 filings (the 500 most active are listed in the directory).
- Insider pages for filers with at least 50 filings.
- 11 sector pages; filings with no known sector have none.
- The weekly digest, one per week.
Anything below those floors is still searchable in the screener.
How fresh it is
Over the last 30 days, the median filing reached Trabud 23 minutes after the SEC accepted it, and 90% arrived within 710 minutes (measured over 3,973 filings). The screener and the recent transactions list query the database directly, so a filing appears there as soon as it arrives; the dashboard's summary figures refresh daily. Company, insider, and sector pages are refreshed daily, and each shows the date of the newest filing it includes.
Where AI is used
The text on company, insider, and sector pages is generated from the data by fixed templates; no AI model writes it. AI is used in two places, and both are labelled:
- The weekly digest summary. Each week's biggest purchases and sales are ranked by dollar value automatically, and an AI language model drafts the two-to-three-sentence summary from that ranked list. The tables beneath it come straight from the filings.
- The AI agent on the home page. It answers plain-English questions by querying Trabud's filing database and, for some questions, SEC EDGAR directly. Like any language model it can misread a question, so check important figures against the original filings.
Known limitations
- Figures are only as accurate as what insiders report. Obvious errors are filtered as described above; subtler ones are reproduced as filed.
- Coverage starts in January 2018. Older filings exist on EDGAR but are not included.
- For some joint filings the stored co-filer list reached its length limit, so the co-filer count is a lower bound (shown as “+9+”).
- Netting shows a filing's overall direction. A filing with both purchases and sales appears as one net buy or net sell.
Corrections
If a figure looks wrong, email info@trabud.com with the ticker and the SEC filing link. Confirmed errors are fixed at the source, so the correction reaches every page that uses the filing.
Not investment advice
Trabud reports what insiders filed. It does not recommend buying or selling any security, and insider activity is one input among many. Read more about Trabud.