Insider Screens Help

InsiderInsights' Special Screens interface is an important and valuable tool for mining our proprietary Insider Infobase for investment ideas. The tool allows you to easily produce a short list of insider-ratified investment ideas that also meet your growth, value, income, momentum, industry, and other criteria. No matter what type of investor you are, or investment type you need right now, our Special Screens tool jump starts your research process.

Sample Screens

Tips

Take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with our Transaction Type Codes.
The value-added processes that turn our insider "data" into "info" generate more transaction types than other services. This added granularity should empower, not confuse.

Yes, open-market buys and sales (transaction types B and S, respectively) remain the most important. But if you're looking for long investments, don't discount including OB and OE* transaction types in your screen as well. Both of these transaction types relay that insiders have accumulated shares by exercising options, and keeping all or most of them instead of selling them immediately for a risk-free profit.

We also label the sale transactions that are associated with option-related purchases (OS and OS*), and differentiate between non open-market trades that had no transaction price (JB and JS)--which are virtually useless for garnering investment intelligence-- from those that traded near the market price on the day (JB* and JS*).

Don't forget to use the "Include/Exclude Transaction Types" filter.
Generating a short list of stocks that have both insiders buying over the past month and, say, a high indicated yield is a great way to start looking for new income investments. But the insider buying doesn't mean much if insiders were also selling over the same period. To prevent stocks with conflicting insider info from hitting your short list, "Exclude" companies that also have the opposite insider transactions than what you are looking for. The date range for the "Exclude" period is the same as the range of input or transaction dates you entered at the top of the Special Screen. So the longer the date range, the more important it is to use the "Exclude" filter to avoid wasting time researching stocks with conflicted insider profiles.

Consider setting the "Trans. Value of Insider Trades" criteria to $0.
Don't get us wrong, the size of the dollar value of an insider's trade is significant, and it is very common for investors to only consider insider transactions of more than $25k, $50K, or even $100K. But if you put "100" in the "Trans. Value of Insider Trades" field, the screener will not include any single record with less than that dollar value when it sums up the total insider transaction value of the firm's trades over the period you've selected. Better to set the value in the field low, and sort the output by the aggregate Transaction Value (simply by clicking that header in the browser output, or in Excel) after results are returned.

Save your favorite Screens.
Our Special Screens tool is as powerful as it is becasue it offers so many different combinations and permutations of insider, fundamental, price action, and industry information to screen on. But so many choices can be confusing. So once you've developed a screen that is important to you--save it! The "Save New Screen" button is at the bottom of the Search page, and you can Manage all your Saved Screens & Searches via the "Manage Saved" link at the top right of the browser page--after you've logged in, of course.

Backtest your screens!
The fact that we warehouse our snapshots of fundamental data allow you to screen our database as if you went back in time. If you're interested to see how a specific screen's results would have performed over the past year, just select the "Fundamentals Date" for your screen from one year ago, and select Transaction or Input Dates that correspond with that period. This generates output as if it were a year ago. Now use your winnowing process to select your probable investments from that back-dated screen, and view their price charts to see if they turned out to be the winners you expected.

Use "0" as a Placeholder to Force Output
If you don't want to limit your screen results with Market Capitalization criteria, but want to see that metric in your results, just place a "0" in the "Market Cap" text box when you screen. Since all firms have at least an iota of market cap, the metric won't limit your results, but you'll have that measure right at hand as you analyze your screen results. Any of the criteria in our "Insider Transaction Metrics" and "Company Size" sections can be shown in your output this way. So can a stock's "Price at Fundamentals Date".

Our Special Screen output is a short list, not a buy list.
As powerful as our Special Screens are for generating high-value short lists, remember that the results should just be a first step in your investment process. We recommend first clicking the hyperlinked tickers in our Screen's output to assess the overall significance of a stock's insider profile. This includes clicking the hyperlinks of insiders' names themselves to analyze the track record of specific filers accross all the companies they file Form 4s for. Only if the insider profile as a whole meets your significance level should you continue to research it further.

The screening criteria below are only available in historical fundamental data beginning 2/1/07:
Short Interest Ratio
Short Interest, 1 Mth % Chge
Short Interest, 3 Mth % Chge
Short Interst as a % of Float
Price Change, 4 Weeks
Price Change, 13 Weeks
Price Change, 26 Weeks
Price Change, 52 Weeks
Price/TTM Sales
EV/TTM Sales
Price/Ebitda
Price/(Cash-Debt)
YOY Q Sales Growth
YOY TTM Sales Growth
YOY Q EPS Growth
YOY LTM EPS Growth
Sequential Q EPS Growth
Current Ratio
Total Debt/Equity
Gross Margin: Q vs TTM
Net Margin: Q vs TTM
Rev Growth: Q vs TTM
EPS Growth: Q vs TTM