Insider trading data are data reported by company insiders to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It could be a director who sold some shares in the company stock, or a CEO who bought 1000 shares of the company he works for.
Insider trading data could be downloaded from the SEC website; this data is provided FREE but is available in raw format.
A lot of websites have insider trading data but you have to pay to download that data.
I choose to get the data for FREE from the streetinsider.com website, the data is not detailed and there are no columns for the number of shares that were bought or sold, the transaction type...
The data could be parsed to extract some useful information but I think that this not worth it because the title information doesn't contain much information about the transaction.
The downloader I have created, downloads the RSS feed and create a database 'insider_data' which contains 3 columns: date: the transaction date, title: the insider transaction description, link: the link to get more information about this transaction.
Insider trading data could help traders judge whether a stock is worth buying or not. A director who buys shares of the company he works for is seen as a bullish sign, while a director who sells shares of the company he works for could be seen as bearish but no necessarily because he could have personal finance problem and thus need some cash.
