"Smart money" is one of the most abused phrases in investing. Every newsletter claims to track it. Every screener promises to show you what insiders are buying. But few explain the hard part: how to date the signal honestly, how to separate real clusters from noise, and how to avoid the backtest cherry-picking that makes everything look profitable in hindsight.
We built StoQuant's smart-money radar because we wanted a tracker we could actually trust. It is built on roughly 300,000 insider filings and 445,000 analyst actions, but the dataset is not the moat — the measurement is. Every signal is dated by when you could first have acted on it, and every outcome is tracked forward from that date. No retroactive re-labeling. No hidden quintiles.
In theory, smart money tracking means watching what informed market participants do before the rest of the market catches up. In practice, it usually means one of three broken products:
A useful smart-money tracker has to solve three problems: event detection, honest dating, and forward tracking. StoQuant focuses on all three.
A single insider purchase is weak evidence. People buy stock for tax reasons, option exercises, personal liquidity, or signaling. But when multiple officers and directors buy in a tight window — a cluster — the story changes. Clusters suggest coordinated confidence from people with operational visibility.
StoQuant flags insider clusters automatically. The definition is simple and public: multiple insiders buying the same issuer within a short window, each disclosed on a Form 4 filed within two business days of the trade. The filing date is what matters, not the trade date, because that is when the information becomes actionable.
This matters because the backtest temptation is enormous. If you let an algorithm peek at the trade date and pretend you knew about it immediately, every insider strategy looks better. We do not do that. The radar dates every signal by the filing date and then tracks forward returns from that point.
Insiders are not the only informed players. Analysts cover most small and mid-cap stocks, and their actions leave traces.
StoQuant tracks approximately 445,000 analyst actions. The pattern we focus on is not the headline upgrade or downgrade itself — the market usually prices that within hours — but the post-event drift. A stock downgraded by multiple analysts in quick succession often keeps drifting lower for weeks as other investors react more slowly. A cluster of upgrades can have the opposite effect.
Again, the key is dating. We mark the analyst action by its publication timestamp and track returns from the next available market open. No peeking. No after-the-fact re-dating.
A lot of search traffic lands on the phrase "hedge fund insider buying tracker." It sounds like a single product that tells you what hedge funds and insiders are buying at the same time. In reality, those are two very different datasets.
A tracker that mixes them without explaining the delay is selling confusion. StoQuant does not pretend to know what hedge funds are doing today. Our smart-money radar focuses on insider filings and analyst actions because those are the datasets with actionable timestamps and clear event definitions.
If you want to track 13F holdings, we point you to the SEC's EDGAR database directly. If you want to know when insiders are clustering into a small-cap name before the broader market notices, that is what we do.
Inside the StoQuant screener, smart-money signals show up as event flags on individual stock pages and in the daily digest:
Each flag is clickable to the underlying filings so you can verify the source. We believe the value of a signal is proportional to how easily you can audit it.
The free tier shows recent flags for stocks on your watchlist. Pro unlocks alerts and unlimited watchlists. Power adds the full event history, ML overlays, and API/MCP access so you can build your own filters on top of the raw feed.
Here is the part most smart-money products will not tell you: even perfectly dated insider clusters do not guarantee returns. Sometimes insiders are wrong. Sometimes the market moves against them. Sometimes the filings are routine and the "cluster" is coincidental.
That is why smart-money tracking works best as one input among many, not as a standalone strategy. Pair it with the Graham screener, quality checks, and risk management. Use it to generate ideas, not to override your own judgment.
StoQuant's own composite score reflects this humility. The Q-Score currently grades out at F: rank correlation near zero over 178 scoring dates, with a 46.1% beat rate over independent 90-day windows. We publish that because a tracker that only shows you its winners is not a tracker — it is a marketing brochure.
If you are tired of smart-money products that cherry-pick their history, try the StoQuant screener. Run the default Graham + insider cluster screen, read the methodology, and check the live accuracy proof before you trust any number on the site.
For a daily update on insider clusters, analyst actions, and Q-Score changes, sign up for the free digest. No credit card required.
Performance figures refer to benchmark-relative outcomes vs the Russell 2000 over date-matched 90-day forward windows. Overlapping observations are thinned to independent windows before statistics are computed. Figures are signal-level and gross of execution costs unless stated. An earlier version of our accuracy page used mis-weighted benchmarks and fixed score bands labeled as quintiles; those figures were withdrawn on 2026-08-16 and replaced with the corrected measurement. See /proof for the live numbers.
Multiple officers and directors buying the same issuer within a short window, each disclosed on a Form 4 filed within two business days of the trade. A single insider purchase is weak evidence — people buy for tax, liquidity, or signaling reasons — but a cluster suggests coordinated confidence from people with operational visibility.
Because the filing date is when the information becomes actionable. Form 4 is due within two business days of a trade, so dating a signal by the trade date pretends you knew about it before the public did. StoQuant dates every signal by the filing date and tracks forward returns from that point — no peeking.
No, and be skeptical of anyone who says otherwise. Hedge fund holdings come from 13F filings, disclosed 45 days after quarter-end and showing aggregated positions. StoQuant's smart-money radar focuses on insider filings (Form 3, 4, 5) and analyst actions because those are the datasets with actionable timestamps and clear event definitions.
Daily Q-Score changes, insider buy clusters, and ML forecast updates for the tickers you follow. Email only, no account needed. See a sample digest.