Insider Flow SEC Insider Trades
- Utilities
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Cosmin Imbrea
Algorithmic trading developer and active market participant with a focus on forex, commodities, and futures. Designs and builds Expert Advisors, indicators, and dashboards for MetaTrader 5, Sierra Chart — emphasizing Supply/Demand zone detection, institutional positioning, and Commitments of Traders - Version: 1.86
- Activations: 5
Insider Flow puts on the chart of a US stock what the company's insiders report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): their open-market buys and sells, together with the company's earnings dates, share offerings, buybacks and late-filing notices. A scanner mode follows the whole US market. Insider Flow is a utility. It does not open, change or close trades.
Insiders are the officers, directors and owners of 10% or more of a company. They must report their trades within two business days. All insider data comes from public SEC EDGAR filings.
On a stock chart
Insider trades. Buys and sells from Form 4 filings appear as green and red arrows on the day of the trade, at the trade price, with a small mark on the day the filing became public. Dashed lines continue from the newest trade prices.
The dashboard. Eight short lines: MARKET, SECTOR, EARNINGS, TAX, SHARES, BUYERS, CLEAN SELLERS and TRADES. Click a line to open it and click again to fold it. Anything amber or red inside a folded part still shows on its line. Each chart remembers which parts you left open.
Trades table. Date, name, role, buy or sell, price, value, size compared with that person's own average, and the change in that person's holdings. A box behind the value marks a trade larger than that person's own average. Click a name to see that person's trades of the last two years. Click value cells to add them up.
Noise filter. Grants, option exercises, tax withholding, gifts and pre-planned (10b5-1) trades are hidden by default. One key shows them again. Trades under 25,000 dollars are hidden (adjustable).
Buyers and clean sellers. A weighted count of different insiders buying in the last 30 and 90 days, and the same count for sells that were not forced (no tax date, no expiring options, no selling plan, larger than that person's average).
Earnings. The usual results window, taken from the company's own past reports, a blackout band before it, and late-filing notices (NT 10-Q and NT 10-K). The earnings block lists the last eight quarters of earnings per share and revenue from the SEC data, with the analyst forecast for earnings per share (optional, from Nasdaq).
Company events. Buybacks, share offerings, shelf registrations, at-the-market programs, convertible notes, preferred shares and 13D stakes, read from 8-K, S-3, 424B and 13D filings and marked on the chart. Click a tag to open a details box.
Share count. Shares outstanding from each quarterly report, drawn as a strip under the candles, so dilution and buybacks are easy to see.
Tax dates and the six-month rule. Zones before the US tax dates, when insiders often sell to pay tax, and lines for the six-month short-swing rule that applies to insiders of US companies.
Market. The VIX and the junk-bond spread, summarized as RISK ON, MIXED, RISK OFF or PANIC. Opened, the line also shows the Cboe SKEW index and the whole-market ratio of insider buys to sells. Grey zones on the chart mark the days when the VIX was high.
Sector. How many companies in this stock's sector have insiders buying in the last 30 days, compared with that sector's usual level. The scanner fills this line.
Scanner mode
Attach Insider Flow to one more chart with the input "Scanner mode" set to true. The scanner reads the SEC's live feed every 10 minutes and the SEC's daily lists of the past days. It shows:
- every open-market insider buy and sell in the US market, newest first, with the move of the stock since the trade,
- company alerts: late-filing notices and new share sales, one plain sentence per company, sorted into serious, watch and routine,
- sector clusters: a buyers bar and a sellers bar for each sector, compared with that sector's usual level,
- market fear: the VIX, the junk-bond spread, the SKEW index and the whole-market insider ratio,
- a reference panel that marks which patterns were tested on SEC data from 2006 to 2026, including the many that did no better than an ordinary insider trade.
Tickers your broker offers are shown in blue. A click opens that stock's chart.
Alerts
Pop-up, sound and optional phone push alerts for a new insider buy, a buyers cluster, a clean sellers cluster, a late-filing notice and a buyers cluster during market fear. The scanner can also alert when a sector's insider buying turns unusually high during market fear, and when a stock rises after a bad-news filing.
Setup (one time)
1. In MetaTrader 5 open Tools > Options > Expert Advisors, tick "Allow WebRequest for listed URL" and add these addresses:
https://api.nasdaq.com (optional: analyst forecast and scanner prices)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org (optional: VIX and junk-bond spread)
https://cdn.cboe.com (optional: SKEW index)
2. Attach Insider Flow to the chart of a US stock. The daily chart works best.
3. In the inputs, replace the example text in "SEC needs a name + contact" with your own name and email address. The SEC asks every program that downloads its data to say who is asking. This text is sent only to sec.gov. It is not sent to the seller or anywhere else.
4. The first load of a stock takes a few minutes, because up to two years of filings are read. Everything is then kept in MQL5\Files\Insider_cache, and later loads are quick.
Good to know
- Stocks only: companies that file with the SEC. European shares have no SEC filings. Officers and directors of foreign companies listed in the US have had to report their trades only since March 2026, so their history is short. Whatever is on file is shown.
- Works with any broker that offers US stocks or stock CFDs. Symbol names such as AAPL, AAPL.US, #AAPL, AAPL.NAS or AAPL.OQ are recognized. For any other name, type the ticker in the input "Ticker override".
- The Strategy Tester has no internet access, so the free demo can only show a message. The video and the screenshots show Insider Flow on live charts. The one-month rental is the way to try the full version.
- The scanner starts with the SEC's lists of the last 10 days (up to 25 in the inputs). A sector's usual level is measured after about 75 days of the scanner's own history. Until then the scanner uses an estimate and says so.
- The optional sources (Nasdaq, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and Cboe) are public pages that can change or stop answering. Insider Flow keeps working without them. The related lines then show "--" or a short note.
- Insider Flow shows public filings. It is not trading advice. Tests on SEC data from 2006 to 2026 found that most insider patterns did no better than an ordinary insider trade, and the tool says so where it shows them.
- Insider Flow is not affiliated with the SEC, Nasdaq, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis or Cboe.
Keys on a stock chart: P dashboard, O drawings, T trades, B buys only, N noise, R rays, E earnings boxes, D share strip, Esc back. P, O and T can be changed in the inputs.
