The academic case for insider data rests on one asymmetry that has held up across decades of study: purchases carry information and sales mostly do not. Jeng, Metrick and Zeckhauser, in their 2003 study of insider transactions, found that a portfolio built from insider purchases earned abnormal returns and one built from insider sales did not. The reason is plain. Executives are paid in stock, so they sell for a dozen reasons unrelated to the business: a house, a tax bill, a divorce, a diversification rule their own board wrote. They buy for one.
Lakonishok and Lee, working through two decades of filings in "Are Insider Trades Informative?", found that the predictive content sits mostly in smaller companies and in the aggregate rather than in any single trade. This page is built on that finding. One director buying is one person's opinion, and people are often wrong. Several insiders buying the same stock inside two weeks is harder to put down to chance, because it takes people with different portfolios, tax positions and personal circumstances reaching the same view at the same time.
Later work sharpened the point. Cohen, Malloy and Pomorski, in "Decoding Inside Information", split insiders into routine traders, who trade on roughly the same schedule every year, and opportunistic ones, whose trades break their own pattern. Almost all of the predictive power sat with the opportunistic group. A cluster is a rough filter for exactly that. Routine buyers rarely line up with each other, so a burst of purchases at once is made up mostly of people doing something they do not usually do.
A cluster is not a buy signal on its own, and it fails in known ways. Several insiders can buy in the same two weeks because a blackout window just closed and it is the first chance any of them had to trade, which lines up the timing but not the reasons. Newly public companies produce clusters when a lockup ends. A board that has just adopted a share ownership rule can produce half a dozen purchases in a week from executives who are just complying. And a cluster of small, round-number purchases by directors reads very differently from one large purchase by the person who runs the business day to day.
So read a cluster as a reason to look, not as an answer. The next questions: how large were the purchases next to what these people are paid, were any of them pre-scheduled under a Rule 10b5-1 plan, did the buying follow an event such as an earnings miss or a guidance cut, and how often have these insiders bought before. The company page and each insider's page are where to check.