Top 5 Insider Buys
The five companies whose insider buying the day scored highest on a composite conviction measure built from SEC Form 4 filings.
What is in the post
A ranked line of five tickers, a heatmap image carrying the conviction scores, and a self-reply that breaks the scores out. Rank one carries the cashtag. The scores live in the image and the reply rather than the main post.
Where the data comes from
SEC Form 4 filings, which are public. A Form 4 is filed when a company officer, director or ten-percent owner transacts in their own company's stock, and it names the person, the role, the transaction type, the size, the price and the date. Every name on this board can be checked against EDGAR.
This is the one publication on the calendar built on listed-company filings rather than on the OTC tape.
What the conviction score measures
The composite conviction score, CCS, is a single 0 to 100 number answering one question: how much does this buying look like someone with real information putting real money at risk, rather than routine activity.
It is built from the Form 4 itself. Broadly it rewards size, how much money went in; seniority, since a chief executive counts for more than a ten-percent owner; speed, how quickly they filed; the kind of transaction, because an open-market purchase held directly is conviction and an option exercise or a grant is not; and company, meaning several insiders buying, the same insider buying again, or buying with no offsetting sales.
The exact weights are not published. What is published is the score, the tier, and the signals line naming which factors fired, so you can see what a score is made of and go read the filings yourself.
The tier bands are printed on the image, so a score always arrives with its label:
| Score | Tier |
|---|---|
| 85 and above | Extreme |
| 70 to 84 | High |
| 55 to 69 | Moderate |
| 40 to 54 | Weak |
| Below 40 | Negligible |
How to read a high score
A high score means the shape of the buying is unusual: senior people, real money, filed quickly, more than one of them, no offsetting sales. It is a description of the filings, and only of the filings.
The board above makes the point better than an explanation can. The largest cheque on it by a wide margin is MAIR at $219M, and it sits at rank four on 59.4. The spotlight goes to SGI at $1.9M, a hundred times smaller, on 73.4, because that one was a chief executive buying. Size alone does not carry a score here, which is the entire reason the score exists rather than a simple dollar ranking.
It is not a claim that the insiders are right, that they know something specific, or that the stock will go up. Insiders buy for many reasons, including reasons that have nothing to do with valuation, and they are wrong regularly. The score measures conviction as expressed in a filing, not accuracy.
When there is no board
The board publishes five names or it does not publish at all. There is no short board, and no blank row holding a place open. Three conditions are checked before anything is posted, and a failure on any one of them means the account is quiet that night.
- Five names have to qualify. The day's filings have to yield five that pass everything below. Four is not a Top 5, and padding the fifth row would be inventing a result.
- Every name has to be something you can buy. A Form 4 can be filed by a private fund or a pooled vehicle with no quoted symbol and no way for a retail account to touch it. Those are dropped whatever they scored, and because the drop happens after the day has already been cut to five, losing one to this rule fails the five-name test above rather than promoting a sixth name in its place.
- At least one name has to reach Moderate. A score of 55 or better on the table above. Five names all sitting in Weak is a thin day dressed up as a ranking, and the whole point of a conviction board is that the top of it means something.
When the board does not appear, the day is telling you the filings were thin: not enough qualifying names, or nothing in them rising above routine. No notice is posted when this happens, because the absence is the notice. The conditions are fixed in advance and applied the same way every night, so a quiet night is never a result being withheld because it was inconvenient.
What it does not mean
- It is not a recommendation. No entries, no targets, no view.
- It is a daily window. The board is the day's filings, so a company with a strong long-term pattern will not appear on a day nobody filed.
- Financing can look like conviction. When several insiders buy at an identical price on the same day, that is usually a private placement or an offering allocation rather than open-market conviction. Identical-price clusters are worth treating with care.
- Filing speed is a proxy, not a virtue. Filing fast scores well because it correlates with intent, not because a late filing means anything improper.