An insider trading tracker is just public filings made readable. The raw material is Form 4 on the SEC's EDGAR system: officers, directors, and 10% owners reporting trades within two business days. The tracker turns that firehose into a feed you can sort by ticker, person, or dollar size.
What it can't do is tell you why someone traded. A CEO buying $2M of stock might signal conviction or just satisfy a compensation requirement. A sale might be a tax bill, a divorce, or a pre-planned 10b5-1 program. The tracker shows the what. The why is your homework. Late filings happen too, and a buy disclosed three weeks late is a different signal than one filed overnight.
The real edge is speed plus structure. Filings are free but buried in XML, and most investors never look at them. A tracker surfaces cluster buys, trade values, and filing lags in one view, so patterns pop instead of drowning you in PDFs. You see the trade while it still matters.
Sources: [SEC Investor Bulletin](https://www.sec.gov/files/forms-3-4-5.pdf)
Use the tracker for signal, not instructions. Conviction comes from your own research.