Across every SEC Form 4 filed between November 3, 2025 and October 17, 2026, 59.4% of sales ran under a pre-arranged 10b5-1 plan — against 3.9% of purchases.
59.4%
48,820 of 82,234 sales were filed as scheduled in advance under Rule 10b5-1.
3.9%
651 of 16,824 purchases. Buying is almost always a decision made on the day.
A 10b5-1 plan is an arrangement an insider sets up in advance: sell a fixed number of shares on fixed dates, months ahead. It exists to protect them from the suspicion of trading on inside information — you cannot act on what you know today if you scheduled the order last spring.
So when a headline says a director sold two million dollars of stock, in roughly six out of ten cases that is a calendar entry, not a judgement. The filing even says so: Form 4 has a checkbox for it, and we read it.
Purchases are the other way round. An insider buying on the open market is putting their own money in, on a day they chose. That is why a purchase carries more signal than a sale of the same size — and why this site shows the two apart.
Scheduled sales are the majority by count but not by value. The average sale under a plan is $899K; the average sale outside one is $3.1M — about 3.5× larger. In dollars, only 30% of all insider selling runs on a schedule, against 59.4% of the transactions.
| Month filed | Sales | Scheduled | Purchases | Scheduled |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 2025 | 3,832 | 55.6% | 880 | 0.7% |
| Dec 2025 | 3,891 | 61% | 780 | 4.2% |
| Jan 2026 | 5,689 | 70.9% | 1,114 | 6.9% |
| Feb 2026 | 7,794 | 50.5% | 1,432 | 3.6% |
| Mar 2026 | 8,946 | 53.2% | 2,217 | 2.4% |
| Apr 2026 | 5,848 | 64.6% | 1,145 | 7% |
| May 2026 | 9,183 | 54.1% | 2,106 | 4.8% |
| Jun 2026 | 11,544 | 57.8% | 1,820 | 3.5% |
| Jul 2026 | 6,365 | 74.4% | 1,158 | 5.7% |
| Aug 2026 | 10,434 | 54.9% | 1,882 | 2.1% |
| Sep 2026 | 5,742 | 59.8% | 1,504 | 1.6% |
| Oct 2026 | 2,966 | 76.8% | 786 | 7% |
Every Form 4 filed with the SEC between November 3, 2025 and October 17, 2026: 99,058 open-market purchases and sales by 16,641 insiders at 4,373 companies.
The 10b5-1 flag is not inferred. Form 4 carries an explicit checkbox stating that the transaction was made under a plan intended to satisfy Rule 10b5-1(c); we read that field from the filing. Filings that leave it blank are excluded rather than counted as unscheduled.
Only transaction codes P and S — open-market purchases and sales. Awards, option exercises, tax withholding and gifts are left out: they are not decisions to buy or sell. Derivative lines are excluded, as are issuers not listed on a US exchange, because Form 4 never states a currency.
The window is the last eleven full months. This site keeps twelve months of filings, so the oldest month on file is always half-trimmed; counting it would distort that month. Eleven full months sits inside that and moves along with it, so the figures above are recomputed every day rather than frozen at publication.
That a sale was scheduled does not make it uninformative. An insider chooses when to put a plan in place, and that choice can itself be timed. It also says nothing about what happened to the share price afterwards — this is a count of filings, not a study of returns.
Every number here links back to the filings it came from. Browse the sales, the purchases, or go to the original documents on SEC EDGAR. The scheduled ones carry a PLAN marker throughout the site.