This hub lists insiders whose filed titles map to the top executive job: CEO, chief executive officer, president, managing director, general manager, président-directeur général, directeur général and directeur général délégué, executive chairman and gérant. Equivalent titles from filings in other languages land here too, as do founders and co-founders. Each insider sits in the bucket that matches most of their filings, and the insider page keeps the title exactly as filed.

The top seat in the research

Seyhun (1986, Journal of Financial Economics) is credited with an information hierarchy among insiders. Jeng, Metrick and Zeckhauser summarise it this way: top executives at the top, other officers in the middle, outside directors at the bottom, ranked by how much their trades say about later price moves.

The ranking does not carry over to profits. Jeng, Metrick and Zeckhauser (Review of Economics and Statistics, 2003) measured the returns insiders themselves earn. In the working-paper version of that study, purchases by chief executives, chairmen and presidents earned no significantly higher abnormal returns than purchases by other insiders. Wang, Shin and Francis (Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 2012) found that in US data from 1992 to 2002, CFO purchases were followed by higher abnormal returns than CEO purchases.

Limits before you read a CEO filing

Lakonishok and Lee (Review of Financial Studies, 2001) locate the predictive content of insider activity in purchases; insider sales showed no predictive ability in their sample. A chief executive may sell to diversify or to raise cash. Cohen, Malloy and Pomorski (Journal of Finance, 2012) show that insiders who trade on a predictable routine carry little information, while the remaining opportunistic trades do. These findings come from historical, mostly American samples and describe averages over thousands of trades, not one filing. The site's method is on the methodology page and its measured results on the performance page.