Board Members
Board members: trades by the people who oversee management
Who counts as a board member here
Non-executive and independent directors, chairs and vice-chairs of the board, supervisory board members (conseil de surveillance, Aufsichtsrat, raad van commissarissen, dewan komisaris), administrateurs, consejeros, amministratori, 董事 and 监事, 取締役 and 監査役, and board secretaries. Executive chairmen go to the chief executive bucket. One gap: when a US, UK or other common-law filing gives only the bare word Director, the site currently files that person under other executives, not here.
Independent directors know more than the label suggests
Ravina and Sapienza (Review of Financial Studies, 2010) found that independent directors earn substantial positive abnormal returns when they buy their company's stock, and that the gap with executive officers of the same firm is small at most horizons. The gap widens in firms with the weakest governance, and independent directors on the audit committee earn more than their independent colleagues. Cohen, Malloy and Pomorski (Journal of Finance, 2012) report that the most informed opportunistic traders are local, non-executive insiders at geographically concentrated, poorly governed firms.
Evidence from UK directors' dealings
Fidrmuc, Goergen and Renneboog (Journal of Finance, 2006) studied how the market reacts to trades by UK company directors. Faster reporting in the UK may explain why abnormal returns there exceed those found in the US. Trades that follow news of mergers, acquisitions or a CEO replacement carry less information, and the ownership stakes of directors and outside shareholders change the reaction.
Reading these filings
All three studies describe averages over historical samples from the US and the UK. None of them tells you whether a given director's trade was informed. The site's measured results are on the performance page.