Getting the Inside Dope on Insider Trading insiderscores.com
By Kathy Yakal
Information on insider trading -- who's buying and who's selling stock in their own companies, and when -- is a key part of every investors' tool box.
But if you're going to use these data in your investment decisions, shouldn't you know something about the particular insider's track record -- i.e., how good have his or her trading decisions been?
InsiderSCORES.com (http://www.insiderscores.com/) takes that premise and runs with it successfully. It tracks 15 years of insider activity and assigns each trader a score based on how well his or her trades predicted subsequent movements in the stock's price.
The site follows all insiders who have traded their own company's stock at least twice in the past ten years (or once in the last five), and whose company's market capitalization is greater than $50 million. Currently, there are about 30,000 active insiders in the site's database.
InsiderSCORES ranks those insiders on a scale from 0 to 100, with 100 the best. One ranking is assigned for buys, and one for sells. Three factors go into these numbers: average return history (which receives the most weight), historical consistency in recognizing significant entry and exit points (using standard deviation) and the number of decisions made. Returns are evaluated for both three and six months after each trade.
The site itself is clean as a whistle. Right up top are lists of the five recent insider buyers and sellers whose trades were most prescient. The ten largest insider trades also are displayed, along with a list of unusual events, like companies with the largest-ever insider buys.
The real meat of the site, however, is its database search tool. Just type in a ticker symbol, and you'll get a list of that company's insider activity, displaying several columns of related information, like the ISC score for each trade, the market value for each trade and total holdings of each insider.
Every day, insiderSCORES updates the site to post breaking news and list trading anomalies-insider trading that is out of the ordinary for specific companies. Weekly tallies also show which sectors are showing concentrated pockets of trades and which companies' insiders are most bullish or bearish. You can set up alerts that are triggered either while insider trading is occurring or when new commentary on stocks you're following are posted.
A more pumped-up version of the service, insiderSCORES PRO (which costs $9.99 a month), includes portfolio tracking with an insider trading twist; a Weekly Insider Sentiment Report that provides rankings based on more sophisticated criteria and a Seasonality Report that helps you better analyze insider trading trends in companies you're monitoring.
Insider trading news, of course, should be only one element of your trading strategy. But it's an important one, and insiderSCORES should be the site you visit to put that information into historical perspective. We give it ***.
insiderSCORES
www.insiderscores.com
Ease of Use: 5
Depth and Usefulness of Data: 4
Editorial Content: 3
Tools and Interactivity: 3
Timeliness: 5
Price: 5
Total: 25
Rating: ***
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