r/stockmarket
Texas Pacific Land (TPL) has a quiet cross-role insider buying pattern most screeners miss
Author identifies a rare cross-role insider buying cluster at TPL over 90 days, questioning its statistical significance.
- Rare cross-role insider accumulation: 1 director and a >10% owner made 60 open-market purchases in 90 days.
- Insiders are backing their confidence with significant open-market capital, signaling strong belief in the company's value.
pulled the SEC Form 4 data for Texas Pacific Land (TPL) and noticed something most insider screeners don’t show:
last 90 days, TPL has had 1 director plus 1 10%+ owner placing 60 open-market purchases combined. cross-role accumulation (where multiple insider role categories independently buy in the same window) is the rarest variant of the insider cluster signal in academic studies. Cohen, Malloy and Pomorski wrote a well-cited 2012 paper on it.
standard insider pages like Yahoo Finance collapse everything into a single Buy/Sell column so you lose the role split. OpenInsider shows the raw trades but doesn’t aggregate by role category.
three questions Im actually curious about:
- how do you think about cross-role clusters vs same-role (e.g. 3 directors buying)? do they carry different signal strength in your experience?
- is 90 days too long a window? the academic studies use 7-14 day windows but those produce far fewer signals on actual tickers
- anyone seen this pattern hold up out-of-sample, or does it tend to be coincidence at the small-sample sizes?
TPL is the current example but the pattern shows up on \~5-10 tickers per quarter in my data.
It shows all those trades on one of the most popular screeners, finviz, and it seems to be a daily purchase of a single share.. Why did you exclude that pertinent piece of information? 60 trades is meaningless, of you consider it's less than 100 shares
OP is likely pumping to dump. This stock is stuck
Zoom out and compare it to the S&P 500
It's not just destroying the s&p, it is also poorly correlated to it. Anyone should want this stock in their portfolio.
fair point, the headline oversells it. most of those 60 are Horizon Kinetics buying 1-50 shares a day, plus 2 director buys.
on the CFO sale though, that’s actually code F (tax withholding on an RSU vest), not an open-market sell. Finviz lumps F and S together but they’re different transactions.
curious what you’d consider the threshold where small-share daily accumulation by a 10%+ holder starts to mean something?
That’s a really solid breakdown, especially the clarification on the F-code vs actual selling. I didn’t realize Finviz grouped them like that, so that definitely changes how I’d read it. As for thresholds, I’d probably look more at consistent patterns over time rather than the raw daily share size.
AI slop
ThetaPal is legit for tracking insiders. AI market scanner paired with it is legit as well.
Horizon Kinetics is a >5% shareholder so you'll see all the trading they do on form 4s which might be what the common insider trades sites are showing. open insider is ok but you'll still have to do a lot of digging in there. For insider sentiment stuff, I usually go to insider oracle. IO is not just trades though -- comp, holdings, and governance stuff.
yeah Insider Oracle is solid for the breadth (comp, holdings, governance). edgarkit is narrower on purpose, just realtime SEC EDGAR filings as JSON with a webhook layer for the trading side.
on Horizon Kinetics, youre right that >5% holders show up everywhere because they have to file every share. the question I keep getting stuck on is the one in my OP: when does their 1-50 share daily cadence stop being mandatory disclosure noise and start being accumulation worth paying attention to? curious how you’d filter for that.