How to follow news and insider trades

The News screen: three tabs and two scopes

Open News in the app. The tab row says what kind of row you are reading:

• Headlines — wire stories and press releases together. A headline links out to the publisher’s page (the ↗ beside the title); a press release has no address to follow, so its title is plain text with a short excerpt of the body under it.
• Reports — what your companies have scheduled and how they reported. See the section below.
• Insiders — insider trades only, one row per transaction reported on a Form 4.

The switch on the right says whose companies: Market reads the feed for the whole market, including items that carry no ticker at all, and My tickers asks about the companies you hold or watch — the portfolio and the watchlist currently selected. In My tickers the line above the rows says how many companies it covers and which portfolio and watchlist they came from, such as Covering 12 companies in Main and Dividends. If the list is longer than the feed asks about in one go, the line says Covering the first … of … companies instead.

Every feed states its age on that same line — Updated 2 hours ago, for example — because news is collected in scheduled passes rather than live. Press Load more under the rows to read further back; when a feed has no more depth, a sentence says so in place of the button. The tab and the scope are part of the page address, so the browser’s Back button returns to the tab you were on.

The Reports tab

Reports always covers your own companies: there is no market-wide reports calendar, so Market is disabled on this tab and a line under the switch says why. The tab has two halves.

• Coming up — earnings dates and ex-dividend dates over the next 90 days, ordered by date, each with a countdown.
• Published — the past year, newest first: each reported quarter (marked Reported) with its EPS and revenue against the estimate and the surprise between them, and the report filings themselves, such as a 10-Q or a 10-K, marked SEC EDGAR and linked to the filing. Filings reach back about a quarter, reported figures the full year. Form 4 filings never appear here — they belong to the Insiders tab.

A company nobody has opened before may have no calendar rows yet. The tab then says it is fetching for that company, and the rows fill in on their own.

A company's News tab

Every company page has a News tab: everything stored about that company, newest first — headlines, press releases, filings and insider trades in one list. The Summary tab carries a short Latest news card with a News tab → link to the rest.

The price chart on Summary can mark the news as well. Turn on Events and a bead appears on each day that carries stored news. For a company you have bought or sold in the selected portfolio, the control becomes Off · News · Trades, and the Trades layer marks your own buys in green and sells in red. The 1D and 5D charts carry no beads, because an event is known to the day, not the minute.

News is collected for the companies someone holds, watches or has a thesis on, so a company nobody has opened yet may show Fetching this feed now on the first visit. Stay on the page and the rows arrive by themselves.

How to read an insider-trade row

An insider row is built from a Form 4 filing, and it shows only what the filing states. The top line is the person’s name and filed … ago — the date the form reached the SEC, which can be a couple of days after the trade itself (insiders generally have two business days to file). Under the name:

• A direction chip — Buy when the number of shares the person holds went up, Sell when it went down, No change when it did not move. It comes from the sign of the share change and from nothing else.
• What kind of transaction it was, from the SEC transaction code: Open-market purchase (code P), Open-market sale (S), Grant or award (A), Shares withheld for tax (F), Derivative exercised (M), Gift (G) and so on. A code without a translation is shown as itself, for example Code Q. A Derivative chip marks a trade in options or other derivatives rather than in the shares themselves.
• The figures — shares traded, the price, the value, the trade date and how many shares the person holds after it.

Read the chip and the code together. A Buy with Grant or award is shares the company gave as pay, not a purchase; an Open-market purchase is the insider spending their own money. To take an invented example: 2,000 shares at $50.00 shows a value of $100,000. Our article on reading a Form 4 goes further into what the codes signal.

The portfolio timeline on the dashboard

The Portfolio timeline card on the dashboard is one column around today for the selected portfolio. Coming up lists the earnings and ex-dividend dates of your holdings over the next 30 days, by date; its heading leads to the Reports tab. Already happened lists what was published about your holdings in the last 7 days — every kind of event, insider trades included, on every plan.

A chip such as 3 new on the card counts what arrived since you last opened it, and a dot marks each new row. The card marks itself read once it has been on screen for a moment.

On the free plan the published half is in time order, Newest first. On Ultimate it is ranked by what each event means for your positions — how much of the portfolio the company is and how far the stock moved that day — and every row carries the reason, for example Shown because the stock moved −6.2% that day and this is 12.0% of your portfolio. The Insiders tab on the News screen links here with Portfolio timeline →.

The weekly digest and insider alert emails

Two emails can be switched on under Settings → Notifications, and both are part of Ultimate:

• Weekly portfolio digest — a short email every Monday with the week across your holdings. A week with nothing in it sends nothing.
• Insider trade alerts — an email on the day an officer or director files a Form 4 on a company you hold. Only a disclosure large enough to matter against your position is sent, at most one email a day.

On the free plan both switches are drawn off with an Ultimate chip and a See Ultimate button. Nothing is sent to an address that has not been confirmed; the switch says so and points to Email & password. Every new account gets Ultimate for seven days once its email address is confirmed, with no card required.

To stop either email, follow the unsubscribe link in it. The page names the email it is about and waits for you to press Unsubscribe — no login needed. Stopping one leaves the other exactly as it was, and the switch in Settings shows the change, because it is the same setting. You can turn it back on there at any time.

The new-events chip on a thesis

A thesis in the investment journal has a review date, and the news is its second reminder. Once something has been published about the company since you last reaffirmed the thesis — or since you wrote it, if you never have — a chip such as 4 new events appears beside the thesis on the Journal, the watchlist, the dashboard and the company page. Click it and the company’s News tab opens on just that period, headed since your last review; Show all news returns to the full feed. With nothing new, there is no chip. More on writing a thesis on the investment journal page.