Insider Buying/Selling of Shares

You can find out if company employees are buying or selling shares of their companies. That's different from what you probably think of as insider trading, which is using inside information unfairly to profit.

This indicator is used by some people to see if corporations believe in themselves. Those in the know seek to profit in a good business by buying shares or want to escape a sinking ship by selling. Usually. Of course, there's lots of reasons corporate officers might buy or sell shares of their own companies. So take with a grain of salt.

The easiest way to do this is simply through money.msn.com or finance.yahoo.com. Enter your stock ticker or company name and look (in both interfaces) to the left of the screen. Choose Insider Trading/Insider Ownership.

To see the actual documents filed with the SEC, choose our database Morningstar Document Research. Once you're in, simply click on Insider on the left hand side.

AND:

Here's SEC/Edgar itself: 

Can I search EDGAR only for insider forms?

Yes. You can limit a search to the insider transaction forms by clicking the radio button marked “only.”

 

Can I find a list of all insider transactions for a specific time period?

Yes. In addition to doing a header search by form type and date, you can find insider transaction reports for previous five business days by using the current events analysis. However, you will not be able to limit your search to only Forms 3, 4 and 5.

Why can’t I find Forms 3, 4, and 5 filed prior to June 2003?

Prior to June 30, 2003, the SEC did not require that Forms 3, 4 and 5 be filed electronically through EDGAR, although filers had the discretion to do so. You can submit a request for a hard-copy of these manually-filed forms.