Insider & promoter trades

How to read insider trading data

The phrase is misleading. Everything on this page is legal, disclosed trading: SEBI's PIT Regulations require promoters, directors, key managerial personnel and other designated persons to report trades in their own company's shares once they cross ₹10 lakh in a quarter. The disclosure exists so that the people with the best view of a business cannot trade on it invisibly.

The asymmetry between buying and selling is the single most useful thing to internalise. There is essentially one reason an insider buys — they think the shares are worth more than the price. There are a dozen reasons they sell, most of them about the person rather than the company: an ESOP vesting, a house, a divorce, tax, or simple diversification away from a portfolio that is 90% one stock. So a lone sale is close to noise, while a cluster of buys by several insiders in the same window is a genuine signal worth chasing down.

Two details this page shows that most do not. The stake change (for example 11.77% → 11.83%) puts the trade in proportion — the same rupee amount means something very different for a promoter holding a third of the company than for an employee holding 0.02%. And pledges and revokes are shown but excluded from the net totals, because pledging shares as loan collateral is not a purchase and lumping it in overstates conviction.

Read this alongside the large-trade feeds: bulk deals and block deals show what outside institutions are doing in the same stocks, and superstar portfolios shows the quarterly filings of well-known investors.

Common questions