TradeStar Insider · How-to
A claim like "the CEO just bought $2M of stock" is only as good as the filing behind it. This explains how to verify an insider purchase against the underlying SEC Form 4 — so you rely on the primary document, not the assertion. It also works as one call to the verify_insider_purchase tool on our MCP server.
For U.S. insider transactions the primary source is the SEC Form 4, filed on EDGAR and public within two business days of the trade. Any trustworthy claim about an insider purchase should trace to a specific Form 4. If it cannot, treat it as unverified.
Reduce it to the fields a Form 4 actually contains: who (the insider and their relationship), company, date filed, transaction code, shares, price per share, and resulting dollar value. A purchase is transaction code P (open-market buy). Sales are S; option-related codes (A, M) are not open-market buys.
With the Insider Buy Signals MCP server connected, ask the assistant to verify the claim directly — for example, "verify that PERSON bought $AMOUNT of TICKER around DATE." This calls the verify_insider_purchase tool, which checks the claim against the full code-P open-market-purchase corpus and returns confirmed with the source filing_url, partial with a claimed-vs-filed diff, not_found, or out_of_coverage — never a guess.
claude mcp add --transport http insider-signals https://mcp.tradestarinsider.com/mcp
Use verify_insider_purchase to check a specific claim: it searches every collected filing, so a genuine buy is not missed. The browse tools (insider_signals_by_ticker, insider_signals_by_date_range) return only the filtered signal set — cluster and large buys — so a real purchase that didn't pass the signal filter would look absent there; don't use them to conclude a claim is false. To read filings by hand instead, look the company up in EDGAR full-text / company search and open its Form 4 filings directly.
Open the filing link and read Table I / Table II of the Form 4. Check each field against the claim:
| Claim says | Filing shows | Match? |
|---|---|---|
| Insider & role | Reporting person + relationship box | — |
| Buy (not sell) | Transaction code P, acquired (A) | — |
| Shares & price | Columns 3–4 of Table I | — |
| Dollar value | shares × price | — |
| Date | Transaction date / date filed | — |
If the code is not P, it is not an open-market purchase — a common source of misleading "insider bought" claims that are actually option exercises or grants.
To verify insider purchase claims directly, call the verify_insider_purchase tool on the MCP server or the GET /v1/verify REST route: give it the ticker, person, amount, and timeframe, and it returns confirmed with the source filing link, partial with an itemised claimed-vs-filed diff, not_found, or out_of_coverage — never a guess. Absence is reported as absence. Both are declared in the OpenAPI contract.
Every field returned by the Insider Buy Signals API and MCP server is parsed straight from the filing and carries the sec.gov link — that is the service's Rule 2: no number is returned unless it traces to a parsed field in a real filing, and records that can't be linked are dropped rather than guessed. So verifying a returned signal is just opening its link and reading the same fields. The REST contract is at api.tradestarinsider.com/v1/openapi.json.