Insider selling is breaking records in Nov 2021

Analysis as of Nov 30, 2021

As the markets hit all time highs, insider selling (where company insiders are selling stock) has reached an all time high as well.

In 2021, insider sales have hit $385bn — already well surpassing the prior record made way back in 2013 (see the query here) —

On a monthly basis, for November, we have cross $50bn in aggregate sales for the first time!

Is this a sign that we have reached a market top, or are corporate insiders just taking some money off the table?

How to do this analysis on Fidap

In order to do this analysis on Fidap, we’ll use the INSIDER_TRADES table here —

We’ll use transactiondate to aggregate the transactions instead of filingdate . This is more accurate as it represents when the transaction actually took place, but will mean that there’s a longer delay in accumulating all the transactions for a given year or month — meaning the numbers above for Nov 2021 will be underreported until the filings catch up.

You’ll also notice that we exclude transactions over $1bn. The reason for this is to account for some outliers that significantly skew the results. You can take this out for a different perspective.

SELECT TO_VARCHAR(transactiondate, 'yyyy-MM') AS MONTH,
       count(transactionvalue) AS COUNT,
       sum(transactionshares) AS shares_sum,
       sum(transactionvalue) AS value_sum
FROM FIDAP.US_EQUITIES.INSIDER_TRADES
WHERE transactionvalue > 0 and 
transactionvalue < 1e9 and 
transactionshares < 0 and
transactiondate > '2008-1-1'
GROUP BY MONTH
order by MONTH