Did Insider Buying Beat the S&P 500 in 2026?

The short answer

Three months after the purchase, the typical stock insiders bought in 2026 was behind the S&P 500: the median purchase finished −1.1% compared with the index over the same weeks, and 47% of purchases beat it. The average looks better (+6.7%, even after dropping the most extreme 2.5% at each end) because a minority of small stocks jumped a lot, so the median is the fairer guide to what an ordinary purchase did.

Averages leave out the most extreme 2.5% of results at each end. A purchase only counts at a horizon once that much time has passed, so the six-month column covers purchases made in the first half of the year.

Which purchases did best

Research on insider trading has long found that some purchases say more than others, and the 2026 filings show the same split. Measured three months after the trade:

This year the strongest group was part of a cluster (2+ insiders in 30 days) (+1.3% against the index for the median purchase) and the weakest was made after a 20%+ fall (−7.1%). Groups overlap, and a group with fewer purchases can swing a lot on a handful of trades.

The biggest winners and losers

How we measured it

Each purchase (Form 4 code P, bought on the open market) is measured from the insider's own reported price to our weekly price one, three and six months later, and the S&P 500 (the SPY fund) is measured over the same weeks. Prices are adjusted for stock splits. Purchases whose filings look mistyped are left out. Gifts, option exercises, awards and sales are not counted. It is the stock's move, not anyone's profit, and past results say nothing certain about future ones. The full method is on how we work and in our guide Is insider buying a good signal?

Examples

The best-known study of the topic, by Josef Lakonishok and Inmoo Lee (2001), found that stocks with heavy insider buying went on to beat the market, especially smaller companies, while insider selling predicted little. Later work by Lauren Cohen, Christopher Malloy and Lukasz Pomorski (2012) separated "routine" insiders, who trade in the same month every year, from "opportunistic" ones, and found the useful signal came from the opportunistic trades. The table above is a simple, live version of that question for this year's filings.

Explain it like I'm 13

Imagine the people who run a pizza shop buying shares of their own shop. We wrote down every time that happened this year and checked, a few months later, whether those shops did better than the average shop in town. Sometimes they did, sometimes they did not. The table shows how often, so you can see it is a clue, not a guarantee.