You’ve read that insiders were buying a particular stock this spring, and you’d like to see it for yourself in the filings rather than take a headline’s word for it. Exchange files, regulatory filings, positions from your broker or data vendor — upload them and ask across them in plain words. Crunch describes what happened in the data. It does not give investment advice.
What you’ll need
- The files, from wherever you have the right to use them: a regulator’s public data sets, an exchange’s daily files, your vendor’s exports.
- Each file in CSV, Excel or Parquet. Each one becomes its own dataset, a table in your workspace.
Step by step
- Check the source’s terms. Some exchange data can’t be redistributed or loaded into third-party tools. Public regulatory data usually can.
- Download the files you need.
- Upload each one — follow Uploading files.
- Pick them together in the datasets pill, so one question can read across them. Crunch works out how they line up — by date, by symbol, by filing.
- Tell Crunch what it can’t see (below), then ask.
Tell Crunch what it can’t see
Market files are full of codes and conventions that the people who publish them take for granted. Say once, at the start, what a newcomer would misread:
- Codes — “transaction code P is an open-market purchase”.
- Who counts — “insiders means Directors and Officers as filed”.
- Symbols — how a symbol in one file maps to a company in another, if the names differ.
- Prices — whether a price file is adjusted for splits and dividends, since an unadjusted price jumps on the day of a split.
- The window — give plain dates. Trading days are only the days in the files.
How to tell it worked
Each upload finishes loading as its own dataset, selected for the conversation. In the answer, How this was counted lists the codes, roles and dates Crunch actually used — check them against the definitions you gave before you rely on a count.
An example
Three public SEC files: 108,302 Form 4 filings, 114,297 insider rows (an anonymous ID and the filed role — no names) and 179,708 transactions. A Form 4 is the filing a company insider makes when they buy or sell the company’s shares.
| You ask | Crunch finds |
|---|---|
| Counting only purchases (SEC transaction code P) dated January 1 to May 31, 2026, by insiders who filed as Director, Officer, or Director,Officer — which five company-months had the most different insiders buying, and how many in each? | Taiwan Semiconductor in April and in May (28 each), F&M Bank Corp in March (15), Everforth in April (13) and Vital Farms in May (11). |
| For Taiwan Semiconductor over the whole January–May period, how many different insiders bought, and on how many different days? | 29 different insiders, on 9 different days. |
Notice how the first question spells out the code, the roles and the dates. That’s what makes the count exact. The follow-up then shows whether the buying was spread out or bunched together: 29 people over 9 days.
Source: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Insider Transactions Data Sets (public domain). A description of what happened — not investment advice.
Good to know
- Crunch works on the files you upload. It does not fetch market data for you, so newer data means a fresh download and upload.
- No investment advice. It says what the data shows, not what to buy or sell.
- Counting “different” people or days is its own question. “How many purchases” and “how many different insiders bought” give different numbers. Say which one you mean.
Related
- Uploading files — formats, size limits and versions.
- Ask one question across two datasets — how files line up.
- Solve a problem in a conversation — one small question at a time.