Three insider-trading signals pulled live from the ARGOS sec vertical's insider_ toolset, as of 17 July 2026. Every figure below is real, current, and reproducible — and every one of them requires a materialized database, not a language model's memory, to produce.
Ask any frontier model “which company insiders are quietly buying right now” and it will confidently invent a plausible-sounding answer — a ticker, a name, a dollar figure, none of it grounded in anything filed with the SEC this week. The gap isn't reasoning, it's freshness and arithmetic: nobody's training data contains a Form 4 filed two days ago, and nobody memorized 184,000 individual insiders' five-year buying medians.
The four things below are precisely what a deterministic, materialized pipeline supplies that an LLM cannot conjure on its own — and the three case files that follow are what falls out when you actually query it.
Form 4s land within two business days of a trade. No model's training cutoff is that recent, and retraining doesn't happen at filing speed.
“79× their own median” requires five years of history, materialized separately for each of ~184K individual insiders.
10.2M classified transaction legs separate opportunistic buying from option exercises, tax withholding, and scheduled 10b5‑1 plans.
Same inputs, same signal_class, every time — no hallucinated catalyst, no invented ticker.
The headline number is misleading on purpose — that's the point of showing it. TSM's 90-day net_discretionary_usd reads negative because one vice president's single $14.0M sale outweighs all the buying combined. But that same window shows 31 distinct insiders independently buying in the open market, including the CEO and three separate chief operating officers — a breadth of conviction a raw dollar total actively hides. A concentrated block of that buying, mostly C-suite, landed in a single batch on July 9, with several executives buying at 50–79× the size of their own historical median purchase.
| Insider | Role | Buy date | Buy $ | × own median |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tien Bor-Zen | VP | 2026-07-09 | $245,836 | 79.0× |
| Yuan Lipen | VP | 2026-07-09 | $163,867 | 51.6× |
| Wei Che-ChiaCEO | Chief Executive Officer | 2026-07-09 | $34,079 | 3.0× |
| Chin Yung-PeiC‑SUITE | Chief Operating Officer | 2026-07-09 | $16,070 | 3.0× |
| Mii Yuh-JierC‑SUITE | Chief Operating Officer | 2026-07-09 | $16,069 | 3.0× |
| Hou Yung-ChinC‑SUITE | Chief Operating Officer | 2026-07-09 | $14,127 | 3.0× |
| Chuang Tzu-Sou | VP · also sold $14.0M | 2026-07-09 | $10,392 | 3.0× |
Reading the top line alone (“TSM insiders are net sellers”) gets the story backwards. Reading the structured fields together — cluster size, C-suite conviction flag, and per-person baselines — is what surfaces the real signal underneath.
Of the 11 insiders who bought QNT stock in the last 90 days, ten had made zero open-market purchases in the preceding five years — flagged individually by first_buy_in_5y on each person's own materialized history, not inferred. All eleven purchases landed on the same calendar day, June 8, totaling $24,661,920 with no sellers at all. That's not one insider's decision reflected once — it's synchronized first-time conviction across an entire board and executive bench.
| Insider | First buy in 5y | Buy $ |
|---|---|---|
| Barron Hal | true | $15,000,000 |
| Jimenez Joseph | true | $3,999,900 |
| Bhatia Manish H | true | $1,200,000 |
| Dehoff Kevin ScottC‑SUITE | true | $900,000 |
| Denman Kenneth D | true | $840,000 |
| Sharan NiteshCFO | false · 1.6× | $390,000 |
The one buyer who did have history, CFO Nitesh Sharan, still only bought 1.6× his own median — a useful negative case showing the tool doesn't inflate everyone into “unusual.”
Volkswagen AG — a strategic investor holding an insider-reportable stake in Rivian — filed 28 separate Form 4s over the window, all discretionary open-market purchases, totaling $999,943,400. That single figure is what pushed the entire “Motor Vehicles & Passenger Car Bodies” SIC sector to +$999M net insider buying in insider_sector_pulse — a sector-level number that would be meaningless without knowing it traces to one filer. Because only two distinct people bought (VW and one other insider, $251,460), the tool correctly withholds the cluster_buy label: this is scale, not breadth, and the classification doesn't conflate the two.
| Insider | Last buy | Buy $ |
|---|---|---|
| Volkswagen AG | 2026-05-04 | $999,943,400 |
| Gomez Aidan N. | 2026-05-19 | $251,460 |
signal_class is a deterministic classification of filed activity, not a buy or sell recommendation. Figures aggregate the price-sanitized value_usd field and exclude planned 10b5‑1 sales from discretionary totals, per each tool's documented contract. Compiled by mcptest against the ARGOS MCP sec vertical.