fedcep,
Lack of granular insider data is the reason I do not use this data. There is a lot of research on this topic and I would be nice to incorporate information on open market insider transactions, but I do not believe this is possible as of right now.
The closest proxy I could come up with looks for changes in the float.
//dpa
Yes, for ZIXI it appears S&P is classifying as buys the transactions of “Grant, award or other under Rule 16b-3(d)” . My back of the envelope checks seem to match the “buy” & “sell” totals. I will need to investigate further, but just wandering… couldn’t you make a case for what S&P does? Isn’t getting/wanting stocks in lieu of salary a sign of confidence? Maybe actual open market buys by insiders are so rare that they are pretty much useless signals (ie only happen during big crashes).
Also… We are in the middle of reviewing insider/institutional data and will be rebuilding it soon. We will finally include insOwn% and hopefully others. Sorry for the very long wait
Thanks Marco. Stock grants are not as compelling of a buy indicator as an exec using their own cash to purchase shares. I can think of a lot of examples where execs are offered a higher total comp if received in shares instead of cash.
Looking forward to the Ins%Own datapoint. This would be very useful.
Sorry to hammer into this, just trying to increase the added value of the datapoint – in addition to the above, stock grants often imply that common shareholders are getting diluted by management as the latter receive newly issued shares/options as compensation at the expense of current shareholders. Of course you can potentially control for this by tracking # of diluted shares outstanding.
Thanks Marco, that’s good news. Insider ownership is a helpful data point, look forward to it being available here.