June 22, 2026
CEOs, Good Traders or Gamblers?
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Most available financial data is generic. I decided to dive deeper and scrape for CEO trades to see if the CEOs who trade their own stocks know something we don't.
The following graphs are based on data that has been scraped directly from the SEC.gov Form-4 filings. These filings are required by law to be filed by any insider when they trade their own stocks for companies that issue stocks domestically on the U.S. stock exchanges.
Only CEO trades (no cluster buys or buy-back programs) that were done as an "Open Market Purchase" (Code "P") with a value >= $50,000 are included. That is, no gifts, no incentive plans baked into contract terms. The CEO puts their money where their mouth is by risking their own dollars.
Why no sales? Because a CEO can sell for many reasons but buy is usually one of two:
1) Either they think the stock is undervalued.
2) Or they're trying to assure investors everything is fine.
YTD means as of May 21st, 2026.
The number of absolute Insider CEO trades by SECTOR (As defined by the GICS), sorted from largest to smallest, doesn't account for number of companies per sector.
The finance CEOs trade the most. The irony. But are they any good? Let's see, but first let's normalize the absolute number of CEO trades by the number of stocks in each given sector.
Graph shows: Number of UNIQUE CEO buys in Sector X divided by Number of CEOs in Sector X
I filtered the sectors to mainly include North American & European stocks since around ~90% of the Form-4 filings will be from North American CEOs because most foreign companies aren't required by law to file Form-4 so it would make sense that the total universe of stocks in the sector are primarily North American as well.
An important note is that it weighs all CEO trades equally, that is, a $50,000 trade and a $1,000,000 trade are both considered one trade.
It seems, in relative terms, it's not the finance CEOs that traded the most year to date but rather the communication services people. Perhaps they are trying to COMMUNICATE something to us?
Number of unique absolute insider CEO trades by INDUSTRY, sorted, doesn't account for number of companies per industry. This gives a more nuanced picture. There are 11 sectors BUT ~145 industries.
The Performance of each industry YTD (As Of May 21st 2026). The industries are defined according to Yahoo Finance.
Methodology: The industry YTD return is calculated by weighting the return of a stock by its respective market cap at the beginning of the year to the TOTAL MARKET CAP of the industry at the beginning of the year. Stocks must have a minimum market cap of $500 million
Interestingly enough, the industries that made the most returns didn't have too many CEOs from those industries buying stock (look at previous chart above) except for Oil & Gas.
This distribution graph shows the timing of CEO Insider buys relative to the last quarterly earnings release.
Negative values indicate the number of days BEFORE the quarterly earnings release that the trade was
executed.
For example, -5 means the trade was executed 5 days before the last earnings report was released.
Postive values indicate the number of days AFTER the last quarterly earnings release that the trade was
executed.
For example, 5 means the trade was executed 5 days AFTER the earnings report was released.
There seems to be a clustering around 5 days post-earnings with a slight left-skew
It seems like most CEOs prefer to execute their trades AFTER the quarterly earnings release.
For those of you that are statistically oriented, ASSUMING null hypothesis, i.e. it's
50/50 that a CEO executes a trade
the days before/after the last quarterly earnings release,
then we would get a X ~ Binomial(128, 0.5)
which for a
2-sided
P-value
= 3.84 * 10-10. So there is SIGNIFICANT evidence to point that CEOs don't time their trades
randomly relative
to the latest quarterly earnings
This graph shows the sector's with the most profitable insider CEO trades. Interestingly even CEOs of big finance companies can't predict their own companies?
% return from the moment the CEO traded (not filing date but date the trade was executed), till YTD (May 21st) for ~140 CEOs. It seems there is some POSITIVE EXPECTANCY.
This last graph has nothing to do with insider CEO trades. I just wanted to see if there is a relationship between the 6 month volume change and its 6 month price change. Why 6 months? Because stock volume can change quite drastically month to month or even quarter to quarter so half a year seems like a good interval for detecting fundamental changes in volume trends. It looks like there is a positive relation albeit a very weak one.
A logarithmic axis scale was used to equally weigh losses and gains, this allows for a regression to fit correctly and without bias.