An SEC Form 4 is the disclosure a company insider (officer, director, or >10% owner) must file within two business days of trading their own stock. An open-market purchase (transaction code P) is an insider buying shares with their own money — the transaction Quantustik keys on.
Most Form 4 activity is not a discretionary bet. Insiders constantly receive and dispose of stock through compensation machinery — option exercises, restricted-stock vesting, shares sold automatically to cover taxes — and those transactions say little about what the insider thinks the stock is worth. A code-P open-market purchase is different: the insider chose to spend their own cash to buy more shares at the current price. That element of choice is why an open-market buy carries more information than a routine grant or vesting event.
Example (illustrative): a Form 4 showing a CFO exercising options and immediately selling to cover the exercise cost tells you almost nothing about conviction; a Form 4 showing the same CFO buying $150,000 of stock on the open market with code P is a far more deliberate act. This example is illustrative, not a live filing.
Form 4 is required by Section 16 of the Securities Exchange Act, filed through the SEC's EDGAR system, and is public and free to read. Its short two-business-day lag makes it far timelier than 13F institutional filings (up to 45 days late) or congressional trade disclosures (30-45 days). But a single insider buy is still noisy, which is why Quantustik looks at clusters of buyers and buys that are unusually large for the insider rather than reacting to any one filing. None of this is personalised investment advice.
Within two business days of the transaction, under Section 16 of the Securities Exchange Act — far timelier than 13F institutional filings or congressional trade disclosures.
An open-market purchase (SEC transaction code P) is the insider choosing to buy shares with their own cash at the current price, as opposed to receiving stock through option exercises, vesting, or grants — compensation machinery, not discretionary bets.
No. A single buy is noisy — insiders can be wrong or trading under a pre-set 10b5-1 plan. Quantustik treats open-market buys as informational context, looking at clusters and unusually large purchases rather than any one filing.
Browse all S&P 500 tickers to see this metric applied to individual companies.
Educational research only — not investment advice.