1
Ingest 8 official sources
Every source is a primary, publicly-available official record — not a scrape of someone else's summary:
Insider buy/sell clusters
SEC EDGAR (Form 4)
every 30 min, market hours
Congressional trades
House disclosures (House-only — see note below)
daily
Trademark filings
USPTO
daily
Activist stakes (13D/13G)
SEC EDGAR
daily
Fund positions (13F-HR)
SEC EDGAR submissions API
daily
Government contract awards
USAspending.gov
daily
FDA catalysts (Phase 3 readouts)
clinicaltrials.gov
daily
Aligned signals
derived — cross-source union, on ingest
on ingest
House-only note:congressional trade data covers the House of Representatives only. The Senate's equivalent public disclosure source is not currently structured enough to ingest reliably — this may be revisited later, but for now, any Congress signal you see here is House disclosures specifically.
2
Cross-reference by ticker & window
Every signal is tagged with a ticker and a date. When two or more independent signal types land on the same ticker inside a compressed time window, that's convergence — the whole premise of the product. One signal is trivia; stacked, independent signals are conviction.
Direction conflicts — for example, insider selling alongside a fund adding a new position — are shown honestly as "mixed," never suppressed or hidden to make a ticker look cleaner than the data actually is.
3
Score & alert
Each ticker gets a 0–100 Convergence Score, computed from how many distinct signal types are active in a rolling 90-day window, weighted by rarity:
Heavy
Insider buy clusters, original 13Ds (not amendments).
Medium
New/increased fund positions, aligned congressional trades.
Context
Government contracts, FDA catalysts, trademark filings.
When bullish and bearish signal types are both active, the score is reduced (never hidden) to reflect conflicting conviction. Each ticker gets a plain-English badge — e.g. "3 independent bullish signals · 41 days."
A
Insider cluster grading: six factors, weighted composite
A cluster is flagged when 3 or more distinct insiders file Form 4 transactions for the same ticker within any rolling 5-day window. Transaction floors filter out noise: trades under $5,000 are ignored entirely; VP/Director trades must exceed $10,000; CEO/CFO trades must exceed $25,000. The minimum aggregate cluster value before flagging is $50,000.
Each cluster then receives a weighted composite score and a grade: A (≥82), B (≥52), or C(<52). Six factors contribute:
Insider Count
Up to 60 pts
15 pts per insider. More coordinated participants = stronger signal.
Seniority
Up to 30 pts
CEO (30) and CFO (27) carry ~3× the weight of a VP (10) or Director (7). C-suite insiders have the most complete view of the business.
Capital Deployed
Up to 22 pts
Scale-adjusted. $2M+ cluster = 22 pts. $50K cluster = 2 pts. Larger bets carry more weight.
Time Velocity
Up to 15 pts
Trades within 1 day score 13–15 pts. Trades spread over 3+ weeks score 0. Tight clustering is rare and meaningful.
Filing Speed
Up to 12 pts
Same-day filers earn maximum points. Voluntary prompt disclosure suggests insiders wanted the signal to be visible.
Win Rate
Up to 22 pts
Historical 90-day returns from prior clusters by the same insiders on the same ticker, computed when enough history exists.
B
Excluding mechanical trades: the 10b5-1 filter
Most insider selling today happens through Rule 10b5-1 trading plans— scheduled months in advance and executed automatically on a preset date, regardless of what's happening at the company right now. Multiple executives on separate, unrelated 10b5-1 plans can land sales in the same week purely by coincidence — often right after a quarterly blackout window lifts — which would look exactly like a coordinated signal if left in the data.
ClusterSignal reads SEC's own 10b5-1 checkbox — added to Form 4 by the 2023 Rule 10b5-1 amendments — directly from each filing, not just footnote text. Any trade marked as pursuant to a 10b5-1 plan is excluded from cluster formation and scoring entirely, not just from the Short Radar badge. A cluster only forms from insiders making a genuinely discretionary, in-the-moment decision.
C
Short Radar: coordinated sell clusters
Regular SOLD clusters and SHORT RADAR clusters are different. Short Radar is reserved for sell clusters that pass additional filters: $250,000+ aggregate and 3+ distinct discretionary (non-10b5-1) sellers, with C-suite participation lowering the value threshold.
Same-day sell clusters that don't qualify as Short Radar are also filtered out — these almost always reflect mechanical RSU vesting-cliff or lockup-expiry sales, not independent conviction. A Short Radar flag is not a short recommendation, but it warrants extra scrutiny.
Signals are rare — and that's the point
Most tickers show nothing at all on any given day. True insider buy clusters happen roughly a dozen times a year across the entire market. That scarcity isn't a flaw — it's the signal. A tool that flags something on every stock, every day, is measuring noise, not conviction. ClusterSignal is built to say nothing most of the time, and to say something worth reading when it does.
D
Ticker Story & cluster detail pages
Every ticker with active signals has a Story page: a vertical timeline of every event across all 8 signal types, newest first, each linking to its primary source (EDGAR, USAspending, clinicaltrials.gov, USPTO). Insider clusters additionally have their own detail page — a 90-day price chart with the cluster window highlighted, the full insider trades table with SEC EDGAR links, score breakdown, company context, and signal flags (dilution risk, earnings proximity, volume spike, filing speed).
Signed-in users also see insider track records — prior 90-day returns for each insider on this ticker, direction-matched (prior buys for a buyer, prior sales for a seller) — and a generated signal summary.
E
AI Analysis
Ticker Story and cluster detail pages include an AI analysis section that, on demand, generates a plain-English summary of what the pattern means in context. A chatbot can fetch any one of these feeds on request — it doesn't watch eight feeds continuously, cross-reference and score them, and alert the day the third signal lands. Persistent structured monitoring is the moat, not the data. Every analysis includes a disclaimer that this isn't financial advice.
This feature is temporarily disabled.
Important disclaimer
ClusterSignal is a research tool, not financial advice. All data is sourced from public official filings and disclosures. Past patterns do not guarantee future performance. Consult a licensed advisor before making investment decisions.