Show HN: Dashboard for tracking insider trading at S&P 500 companies(quiverquant.com)

  KID TRADERS

  Using data on a half a million accounts from Finland from 
  1995 to 2010, the study came to a surprising conclusion: 
  accounts set up to benefit kids 10 years and under did 
  really well at stock picking, and did especially well just 
  before mergers, earnings releases and events that generate 
  big stock moves.


  The analysis was possible since Finland makes available 
  unusually detailed information about the identities of 
  investors.


  “When guardians trade through under-aged accounts, there 
  is a relatively high probability that they are trading on 
  private information,” the authors, Henk Berkman, at 
  University of Auckland, Paul Koch at the University of 
  Kansas and Joakim Westerholm at the University of Sydney, 
  conclude in a paper slated to be published in the Journal   
  of Finance.


  The gap between the junior set and typical accounts held 
  by adults was striking: in the day following trades made 
  by kids, their accounts outperformed the adult accounts by 
  9 basis points.


  Ahead of major earnings announcements, the kids chose 
  correctly whether to buy or sell 57 percent of the time 
  and beat their elders by 1.1 percent in the following day.


  It gets even better - at least for junior. On trades made 
  the day ahead of a merger announcement, juvenile 
  portfolios outperformed by 12 percent the following day, 
  and made the right decision to buy or sell an uncanny 72 
  percent of the time.


  The rest of the market, by the way, chose correctly 
  whether to buy or sell only 50 percent of the time.


  This is probably not all due to inside knowledge, 
  according to the study. The guardians tended to be richer 
  and may simply have been more successful at investing, the 
  authors argue, due perhaps to higher intelligence or an 
  advantage in obtaining legal, but valuable information.


  Even so, the fact that the juvenile accounts outperformed 
  ahead of mergers while the guardians’ accounts did not 
  implies that the adults were smart enough to know better 
  than to trade on inside knowledge in an easily traceable 
  way.