Mimickers of Corporate Insiders Who Make Large-Volume Trades
Bettis and the Vickreys focus on large trades by senior insiders, showing how role, size, public-availability dates, and costs change a mimicry study.
Bettis, Vickrey, and Vickrey narrow the insider universe to large-volume transactions by high-ranking insiders. They use the CDA/Investnet database to identify when transaction details became widely available, avoiding the coarser publication-delay assumptions common in earlier work. Their sample covers NYSE and AMEX firms from 1985 through 1990 and evaluates purchase and sale portfolios separately over several horizons.
The study reports abnormal returns for outsiders mimicking selected transactions after assumed costs, in contrast with Seyhun and Rozeff–Zaman. That disagreement is informative about research design. The authors deliberately select trades of at least 10,000 shares, restrict exchanges, emphasize senior roles, and use a particular public-availability convention. It is evidence about an intensity-filtered subset, not the average Form 4 row. The historical sample also predates current electronic filing and modern market structure.
For Insider Atlas, the paper supports displaying trade size and insider role rather than flattening all filings into a count. It does not justify a “large means important” badge by itself. Dollar value may be missing, distorted by filing errors, or dominated by a single holder; an option-related sale can be large for compensation reasons. Cluster pages therefore show distinct insiders, roles, transaction codes, source filings, and values together. The paper also belongs beside cost-focused work because the outsider question depends on when the public could actually observe and act on a filing.
Abstract excerpt
“Most prior research shows that corporate insiders can systematically earn abnormal returns by buying or selling their own securities.”
Connections in Insider Atlas
The BGDE purchase cluster and BGDE company page expose role and reported value for each member, the two filters central to this study.