How Can I Find and Understand Insider Trades?
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The Insider Trades feature on Unusual Whales tracks when company insiders buy and sell shares of the company at which they are employed, as soon as trades are reported. Getting there is simple to do. From the main page, first click on “Flow Data”, then select “Insider Trades” under the Stock Data category in the dropdown.
This transports you directly to the Insider Trades page with blank filters. In its raw form, Insider Trades will display all insider transitions of all types, regardless of the insider’s status with a given company. In line with that, the feed will also display all tickers/companies. We’ll start with the OVERVIEW page for Insider Trades.
Insiders Overview
Here we see every ticker on the market. The Insider Trades Overview defaults to order the MAG7 first, and displays the ticker, last trading price, the buy amount and sell amount, as well as the sector and market cap of each ticker. You can narrow down by cap size, time frame (1 month to 12 months), sectors, and even the price and buy/sell percentages.
To see a live feed of individual trades and breakdowns of those trades, we’ll click the TRADES button at the top of the filter settings.
Insider Trades
On the TRADES view, we can see individual transactions made by insiders for any given ticker. The filters on this view are more expanded, allowing for ticker and owner filtering, sectors, industries, transaction codes (buy/sell/etc), and the other filters mentioned for OVERVIEW.
To see the specific information about each transaction, you can click the dropdown arrow next to the ticker the transaction was associated with. This will open a dropdown to display the type and scope of the transaction, including the owner and the owner’s Director/10% Owner status. You can even adjust the feed to only display insider transactions on tickers that are saved within one of your Watchlists.
For a breakdown of all insider transactions that have occurred on a ticker, you can click the ticker itself for a full insider breakdown. So to do that, we’ll click the JD link above the dropdown (not within the dropdown).
Here is the Insider Transactions page for JD; we can see a chart of the average price in 1, 3, 6, and 12 month intervals, as well as a table below showing all insider transactions that have been made for the ticker.
Custom Alerts
You can also set up Custom Alerts for insider transactions. From the Custom Alerts page, select Stocks → Insider Trades → Watchlist → Select Watchlist → Name Alert, set premium range and select sliders (in this case, we’ve selected ‘Is Director’, ‘Is Officer’, and ‘Is 10% Owner’). Select “Create Alert”, and you’ll now get Alerts for insider transactions meeting your criteria.
Additionally, if you’ve set up Push Notifications on the Unusual Whales app, you’ll get Push Notifications on your mobile device any time an insider transaction meeting these Alert criteria occurs for companies in your Watchlist!
You can get a breakdown of setting up custom alerts and enabling them in this article, as well.