InsiderCow Review – A Tool for Tracking Insider Trading

About InsiderCow

Insider trading can provide some important clues to traders about where a stock is headed. CEOs, CFOs, and other company executives often have significantly more information about a company’s position in between earnings reports than the public. Thankfully, these insiders are required to file trades with the SEC, so it’s possible to track when they purchase and sell shares of their own companies. 

That’s where InsiderCow comes in. This trading platform collates SEC filings to enable traders to easily track and search insider trades. InsiderCow isn’t the prettiest research platform on the market, but it fills a niche that’s only covered by a few other tools. Importantly, InsiderCow is one of the only platforms covering insider trades in real-time rather than on a delay.

There are tons of trading platforms out there, from Stockopedia to MoneyLion, so how does InsideCow stack up? Let’s take a look at InsiderCow. We’ll look at their pricing, features, and more so you can decide if this platform is worth your money.

InsiderCow Pricing Options

InsiderCow makes historical or delayed insider trading data available for free. But, if you want real-time filing data, you’ll need a paid membership. InsiderCow charges $29.95 per month, payable through PayPal. You can also try out the software for free for 14 days before committing.

Features of InsiderCow

Filing Data

InsderCow’s primary feature is relatively basic, but also extremely important. This software collects SEC insider filing data and turns it into a simple table of transactions. You can choose to see a table of all transactions, a table of purchases, or a table of sales. For each transaction, the insider’s name and position are displayed, along with the total number of shares bought or sold, and the total number of shares that insider owns.

InsiderCow keeps historical data. But, there is no easy way to view transactions even from the previous day without searching for a specific stock. If you do search for a specific stock, though, you can find insider transactions dating back more than a decade.

InsiderCow also has data about institutional purchases and sales that are reported to the SEC. Helpfully, this data displays an institution’s ownership (as a percentage) of a company along with the purchase and sale data. You can also set a date range to search historical institutional transaction data.

Perhaps most important, InsiderCow calls out clusters of insider purchases in a special section of the platform dubbed ‘Hot Buys.’ This lists companies with at least three different insiders buying more than $1,000 worth of shares each within a period of seven days. These cluster buys may represent actionable trading signals. However, note that only purchases, not sales, are displayed as clusters in InsiderCow.

Data Screener

InsiderCow also offers a basic data screener that allows you to query some of the filing data. There are a few built-in screens that are useful. For example, you can screen for companies with the most CEO share purchases in the past week or the most insider sales in the past week.

However, the screener isn’t designed in such a way that you can easily replicate or modify these pre-built screens. There’s no parameter logic, so you’re limited to querying transactions from all insiders or one type of executive (for example, CEOs) at a time. You also cannot screen multiple specific stocks or an entire market sector at once. The best use of the screener may be to look for high-volume insider transactions within a specific date range.

Alerts

InsiderCow offers two different types of email alerts.

With a basic alert, you can enter stock symbols and receive a notification for any insider or institutional transaction that is filed for those companies.

The parameters for advanced alerts are more similar to those for the data screener. However, note that you cannot filter your advanced alerts by a designated set of stocks. In addition, InsiderCow only lets you create one advanced alert at a time.

Layout And Customization

InsiderCow’s layout isn’t hard to navigate, but the platform could use a refresh. The website looks and feels antiquated, and the data tables are small and difficult to filter. There are no customization options beyond setting alerts, and you can’t easily export data to Excel.

In fact, InsiderCow could be a much more powerful tool if the data display interface was condensed into a single page with more filter options rather than spread across multiple displays. In that sense, the entire tool could become a large, responsive data screener.

InsiderCow Platform Differentiators

InsiderCow isn’t the only tool to offer information about insider trading, but it’s one of only a handful. What really separates this platform is that it offers real-time filing data for the current trading day and includes historical data going back decades. It’s also unique for offering a screener built entirely around insider transaction data.

Where InsiderCow falls short is in providing access to the past day, week, or month of data. This is important because insider trades around a company rarely fall on a single day. While historical data can be accessed for a single stock, it’s easy to lose track of insider trades throughout the week when data is only shown for one day at a time.

Perhaps the biggest issue with InsiderCow is that it’s extremely expensive for what the platform includes. GuruFocus, which has only slightly delayed insider trading data and highlights insider cluster trades, costs $399 per year. But, that platform also comes with an extremely powerful stock screener, fundamental market analysis, and stock picking recommendations from highly successful traders. 

What Type Of Trader Is InsiderCow Best For?

InsiderCow is best for traders who can use information about insider activity to get ahead. Trading based on insiders and institutions may be a standalone trading strategy, or it may be combined with either technical or fundamental trading. In that sense, InsiderCow can be a useful tool for a wide variety of traders from beginners to experts. However, InsiderCow only provides data about insider trading and little else, so traders will certainly need a variety of other data sources to provide context for the trades that insiders and institutions are making. 

Pros

• Simple, understandable display of insider trading data
• Covers filings in real-time
• Data screener with pre-built screens
• Email alerts for a custom list of stocks
• Includes information about institutional trades

Cons

• Expensive compared to similar platforms
• Interface is clunky and outdated
• Only one advanced alert allowed at a time