What does not workSAVNG Research · September 10, 2026
Insider buying does not tell you a company will survive
The claim. Across the 20-year corpus, 93.4% of companies that later went bankrupt had a qualifying opportunistic insider buy in their final twelve months. So did the survivors. Insider purchases say nothing about failure risk, which is why every stock page carries four separate distress checks.
What happened and what changed
- Test: every company in the Form 4 corpus that was later delisted for cause (bankruptcy, going-concern failure), matched to its insider record over its final twelve months.
- Result: 93.4% of failures had a qualifying opportunistic insider purchase in that window. The survivor base rate is the same. The signal has no power to separate them.
- Consequence: four distress checks were added to every stock page, independent of insider activity.
Reproduce: node savng-insider-history/delisting-outcomes.js → reports/delisting-outcomes.md
Where it does not apply
Use the distress checks (cash runway, refinancing wall, going-concern language, covenant pressure) for survival. Use insider buying for timing, never for safety.
SAVNG is an educational research publication, not a Registered Investment Adviser. Everything here is general-circulation information produced by an automated pipeline — the same for every reader — and is not personalized investment advice, an offer, or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Any performance figure is hypothetical; past performance does not predict future results. Details.
Published by SAVNG Research. Every figure on this page is read from the study data at render time; if the study changes, the page changes with it.