SENTRA SIGNALS
An insider-activity radar for the full Russell 3000. Surfaces the trades that carry real signal and filters out the noise.
The Problem
The most powerful signal in markets has always been hiding in plain sight: insiders. CEOs, CFOs, and major shareholders see earnings before they are announced, contracts before they are signed, product pipelines before the market has any idea. They have an edge that no analyst and no algorithm can replicate.
And by law, every time an insider acts on that conviction, they have to report it to the SEC within two business days. The data is public. The signal is sitting there. So why does it get ignored?
Noise. Insiders file thousands of trades every month: routine stock grants, scheduled sales on pre-set 10b5-1 plans, small compensation exercises. None of that means anything. Finding the trades that matter means telling the difference between an insider following a calendar and one acting on conviction. That is not easy to do at scale.
Sentra reads every Form 4 filing across the full Russell 3000 (~2,899 tickers), classifies each insider using a methodology grounded in academic research, and surfaces the trades where the signal is real.
CMP Classification
Every insider in the Russell 3000 is classified using the Cohen, Malloy and Pomorski (2012) framework. The core insight: insiders who buy outside their historical calendar patterns generate meaningful returns. Insiders on predictable schedules generate essentially none.
The insider bought outside their historical calendar pattern. This is the strongest class of signal. Opportunistic buyers tend to act when they have a genuine reason to buy, not because a scheduled plan told them to.
There is insufficient trading history to determine a pattern. The insider may be new, filing rarely, or joining the company recently. Carries signal but with less certainty than Opportunistic.
The insider trades on a predictable, calendar-driven schedule. These are typically plan-based or compensation-related transactions. The research shows they carry little forward-looking signal.
The Conviction Score
The color tells you the classification. The number (0–100) ranks that trade relative to other trades in the same classification. A score of 80 means this trade scored better than 80% of similar trades on the same signals. It is a description of trade characteristics, not a profit prediction.
Only purchases are scored. Insider selling carries almost no forward-looking signal: insiders sell for many reasons (taxes, diversification, personal liquidity). Sentra scores open market purchases only.
How much the purchase increases existing holdings as a percentage. A large increase relative to existing position signals real conviction. New positions (no prior holdings) are scored by dollar size.
The stock's 90-day price return before the trade. A pullback before a buy scores higher than buying into an uptrend. Not applied to Opportunistic trades (walk-forward IC is near zero for that group).
10% owners and co-founders score highest (12 pts), followed by CEO, CFO, President, and Directors (9 pts), then other titles (7 pts).
Smaller-cap companies score higher. Pearson IC is modest (−0.11); Spearman is near zero. Labeled as a lottery tilt: adds high-variance upside potential, not a consistent edge.
Composite IC 0.05 to 0.09 across validation sample. Factors excluded from the model (noise or lookahead bias): trade size in dollars, insider cluster breadth, sector, 52-week range, and prior track record.
Academic Foundation
Methodology
Sentra Signals provides informational data sourced from public SEC filings only. It is not a registered investment advisor and nothing on this platform constitutes investment advice. Users are solely responsible for their own investment decisions.