Easy Guide: Pull C-Suite Ownership & Insider Sales in Seconds

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Having trouble finding accurate share counts for founders, CEOs, and C-Suite executives of publicly held companies?

It's easier than you think. Many sites contain confusing or conflicting information that may be outdated. If you want accurate and updated share count information, we’ve got a simple walkthrough guide for you.

After reading this article you will be able to:

1. See the entire management team’s individual ownership of a company

2. See insider trading of a company and C-Suite

For this article, we will be pulling share counts (as of the time of writing) for the ticker symbol LMND (Lemonade Insurance) as an example.

1. How To Pull Management Share Ownership

Here’s the simple way to pull the official share count of CEOs and the entire C-Suite:

1. Go to the SEC EDGAR Database: https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch

2. Type in the name of the company in the “search by” section below.

3. Select the company from the drop-down list

4. You should now see the company’s SEC page. From here, click “view filings”

5. From here, type in "DEF 14A” in the keywords search option. The DEF 14A is a filing that contains a list of management and how many shares they own.

6. You now have the below list of DEF 14A filings. Select the most recent one that says “proxy statement” and click “open document”.

7. You should now be looking at the filing. Search the document for the phrase, Ownership of Certain, which will be part of the title typically for the ownership breakdown.
   
   The full section title is typically Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management, or a similar variation, such as using the word Stock instead of Security. If no results show, check the table of contents for the most similar heading.

When you do, you’ll find the below:

And now we have total share counts of the C-Suite! Above you can see share ownership by Daniel Schreiber, Shai Winniger, Tim Bixby, etc… share ownership of the business Lemonade, Inc.

DON’T STOP HERE

You must read the footnotes! Next to each name is a number saying if there are footnotes.

For example, if we zoom in, we can see CEO, Daniel Schreiber has footnote (4). So for full details of his share ownership, we should read that footnote, which immediately follows.

If we look at footnotes, here it is expanded.

Now we know the details of the share ownership.

It’s important to read this footnote for many reasons. Sometimes there are caveats to shares owned. For example, the list of management generally shows us “Beneficially Owned” shares.

However, investors generally want to know about “Sole Dispositive Power” shares." These are shares that can actually be sold by that person.

Sometimes, a person has shares that are “Shared Dispositive Power”. Those are shares that the individual does not have complete control over. For instance, they are often performance based shares that they may never have full access to.

If this is the case, it will generally be mentioned in the footnote.

That’s all there is to it!

Next up, we will figure out the easy way to find insider sales of a stock.

2. How To Find Insider Sales of a Stock

If you want to go a step further and see if any individuals made insider sales, it’s just as easy. Follow these steps:

1. Go to https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search and type in the company name.

2. Now type in the individual’s name, or leave it blank if you want to see all insider sales. In the filing category select the option that says “transactions”.

When you click “view all” under filing category, highlighted is the one you want to choose.

3. You then get a list of insider sale documents. See the example below.

Open up any of these filings and you’ll see the insider sale! That’s all there is to it!

If you click the “filed” column, it will sort by date, for easier navigation.

That’s everything!

Remember, this is the SOURCE material! These are the documents required by law that are filed with the SEC by a business and individual. All other websites and news outlets pull their data from these sources.

Therefore, this method gives you the most accurate and up to date information.

If you found this helpful, leave a comment and let us know, and consider subscribing for future investing tips and walkthroughs.

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