Following the money — when executives and politicians buy their own stocks, should you be paying attention?
Every Tuesday and Friday at 5:10pm Berlin time, a Python script wakes up on an old laptop sitting in my apartment, scrapes public filings from the SEC and Capitol Hill, sends everything to Claude Opus, and places real-ish trades on a demo account. All without me looking at it first. No approval screen. No "are you sure?" No human in the loop at all.
I've been running this as a deliberate experiment: give the bot a fixed budget, let it run for months, and check back to see how a portfolio built entirely on insider signals and AI reasoning actually performs. The thesis isn't to get rich — it's to find out whether there's a real edge buried in public data that most people scroll past.
Let me walk you through the thinking.
![PLACEHOLDER: System architecture diagram showing the pipeline — laptop → SEC/Capitol Hill scraper → Claude Opus → demo trading account, with a Tuesday/Friday schedule indicator]
There's a concept in investing called skin in the game. It means having something real to lose if you're wrong. Analysts can upgrade a stock and move on. Journalists can write bullish articles. Reddit can hype whatever it wants. None of them lose money if they're wrong.
But when a CEO buys shares in their own company with their own personal money? That's different.
In the US, corporate executives — CEOs, CFOs, directors, large shareholders — are required by law to publicly disclose when they buy or sell their own company's stock. These filings go to the SEC and are publicly available, usually within two business days of the trade. The site openinsider.com aggregates all of them.
This creates an interesting situation. Every time a C-suite executive decides to put their personal capital into their own company's stock, they leave a public paper trail. And these people are not buying blind. They know their quarterly numbers before the market does. They know the pipeline. They know whether the business is struggling or quietly accelerating. When they buy, they're making a bet with information no outside investor has.
That's the signal. It's legal, it's public, and most people ignore it.
Here's the thing — a director buying $5,000 of stock as a token gesture is not the same thing as a CEO doubling their ownership stake.
The bot tries to separate meaningful signals from noise by scoring every insider buy on three things:
If an executive already owns 50,000 shares and buys another 50,000, that's a 100% stake increase. That's a statement. Compare that to someone buying $10,000 when they already hold $10 million worth. The percentage matters more than the headline dollar figure.