Top Insiders by Track Record

What makes a "top" insider

Not seniority, and not trade size — track record. The leaderboard scores each insider on the actual outcomes of their open-market purchases. For every insider it takes their buys (transaction code P, excluding 10b5-1 plan trades and derivatives) that have a matured 3-month or 6-month return anchored at the filing-date close, then computes two numbers:

• Hit rate — the share of those buys that were positive after the horizon.
• Average return — the mean return across them.

Insiders with fewer than min_trades scored buys (at least five) are excluded, so a single lucky purchase can never top the table.

The leaderboard endpoint

GET /v1/insiders/leaderboard (Business plan and above) takes four optional parameters:

• horizon — 3m (default) or 6m.
• order — hit_rate (default) or avg_return.
• min_trades — minimum scored buys to qualify (default and floor 5).
• limit — rows to return (1–100, default 25).

# Top insiders by 6-month hit rate, min 10 scored buys
curl "https://api.form4api.com/v1/insiders/leaderboard?horizon=6m&order=hit_rate&min_trades=10&limit=25" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: $FORM4API_KEY"

Each row carries the insider's CIK and name, their scored-buy count, hit rate, average return, and last buy date; the response also tags the scoring version in a methodology field. Full schema is in the docs, and the leaderboard page renders it directly.

Drilling into a single insider

Found a name worth a closer look? Look up their CIK, then pull their scorecard:

# Find an insider's CIK by name (any plan)
curl "https://api.form4api.com/v1/insiders?name=Smith" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: $FORM4API_KEY"

# Their buy track-record scorecard (Pro plan and above)
curl "https://api.form4api.com/v1/insiders/CIK_HERE/scorecard" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: $FORM4API_KEY"

You can also list an insider's raw transactions at /v1/insiders/{cik}/transactions and screen the broader corpus with the transaction filters.

Reading the leaderboard honestly

A leaderboard is easy to over-read. A few caveats baked into how this one works:

• Returns are absolute, not market-adjusted. In a strong bull market most insiders post high hit rates simply because most stocks rose. Compare insiders against each other over the same window, not against an absolute bar.
• Only matured returns count. A 6-month leaderboard ignores buys from the last six months, so the most recent activity is not yet reflected.
• Sample size matters. Raise min_trades to filter out insiders with thin, noisy histories.
• Past performance is not predictive. A strong historical record is a starting point for research, not a trade signal on its own — pair it with current activity and cluster context.

Frequently asked questions