Finding names before the numbers
Momentum screens tell you money is already moving. They cannot tell you whether people are moving. This is where to look for that, and how much to believe each place.
The question that sorts everything
Every source below is somebody telling you something. The only question worth asking is: what does it cost them to be wrong?
Money at risk, disclosure required by law. An officer buying with her own money. A fund crossing 5%. They pay for being wrong, and they file because they must.
Behaviour, not opinion. Search volume, app downloads, job postings, review counts. Nobody in these datasets is discussing a stock, so nobody is trying to move one.
People talking. Message boards, Reddit, X, Telegram. Nothing is verified and nobody pays for being wrong — but this is where a story shows up first, months before it reaches the other two tiers.
Tier 3 finds it. Tier 1 or 2 confirms it. Never the reverse. A name that surfaces on a message board and then shows insider buying is interesting. A name with insider buying that you then go hunting for enthusiasm about is you talking yourself into something.
How stale is it when you see it?
| Filing | Lag | What it's good for |
|---|---|---|
| Form 4 insider buy | 2 business days | Near live. The best free signal there is. |
| Schedule 13D activist stake | 5 business days | Fast. Somebody intends to make something happen. |
| Congress STOCK Act | up to 45 days | A reason to look at a name, never to time one. |
| Form 13F fund holdings | up to 135 days | History. Research a name you have; never find one. |
13Fs are due 45 days after quarter end, so a position opened on 2 January first appears in mid-May and may already be closed. Anyone treating a new 13F position as news is reading about last season.
Tier 1 — money at risk
Insider buying
Unusual options activity is a genuine signal and useless on small companies, most of which have no real options market. The small-cap substitute is insider buying.
OpenInsider's cluster buys page is free and is the one that matters: several insiders at the same company buying in the same window. One officer buying is a data point. Three in a fortnight is a conversation that happened inside that building.
- Open-market purchases only — transaction code
P. Exercises and grants are pay, not conviction. - Officers and directors, not ten-percent owners. A fund crossing a threshold is doing mechanics.
- Size relative to the person. $40,000 from a director beats $2m from a founder holding nine figures.
- Ignore selling. Most of it is scheduled 10b5-1 plans, tax withholding or gifts.
For buys and sells together, Finviz has the cleanest free table.
Activist stakes
A 13D is filed within days of crossing 5% with intent to influence. A 13G is passive and matters far less. At small-cap size a 13D can be the whole story. Free on EDGAR — form types SC 13D and SC 13G.
Most daily short volume is broker mechanics — a market maker selling to you marks the trade short with no bet against the company. One documented case: 140 million shares of cumulative daily short volume over a fortnight against a real short-interest rise of 1.5 million. Real short interest reports twice a month, on a lag.
New management
A new chief executive at a small company doesn't signal a thesis, it replaces the thesis — everything a screen knows describes the last management's decisions.
The filing is Form 8-K, Item 5.02, within four business days of any CEO, CFO or board change. The free way to read it is EDGAR — filter to form type 8-K for a company and go to Item 5.02. Boardroom Alpha packages the same filings with a board-quality rating, but shows only a handful of recent moves publicly; the tracker itself is a seven-day trial and then paid.
Watch for a new chief executive who then buys stock with their own money. An 8-K Item 5.02, then a Form 4 a few weeks later. Both free. An incoming CEO has the clearest view of what they've walked into and no obligation to buy.
Congress and 13Fs
Capitol Trades is free and run by 2iQ Research, twenty years in insider-transaction data. WhaleWisdom is free for the trailing two years of 13F data, which is enough; full history and exports are $300–500 a year. Either way 13Fs are long-only, exclude shorts, and carry the lag above.
Check the period label on any holdings page before believing it. On 17 September 2026, Dataroma's Berkshire page still showed Q4 2024 holdings, on a filer that reports every quarter. A stale table looks exactly like a current one.
Tier 2 — behaviour, not opinion
The least contaminated tier, because nobody in it is talking about a stock.
Quiver's Google Trends page is free and ranks public companies by month-over-month change in search interest. Scan the top for a small name you don't recognise with no news attached.
Then use Google Trends on that name — and search the product, not the ticker. Almost nobody googles a ticker symbol, so ticker searches measure investor attention rather than customer demand. Five-year window, and always against a named competitor.
Also worth watching: app store rank within category over weeks; job postings on the company's own careers page, because fifteen new salespeople means a forecast was made; and review counts, not scores — the number accumulating per month is a usage proxy.
Tier 3 — people talking
This tier is not worthless — it is unverified, which is a different thing. It is the earliest of the three and the only one that can tell you a story is forming before any of it reaches a filing. Read it for what is being said and why, never as a vote count.
The most useful of the three Tier 3 venues, because it is the only one with visible moderation, threaded argument, and people posting actual work that others can pick apart.
| Subreddit | What it is |
|---|---|
| r/pennystocks ~2.3M | The main microcap room. Moderators banned all promotion after promoters flooded in — which is why it's readable, and why they now arrive disguised as enthusiastic members. |
| r/smallstreetbets ~523K | Smaller and more small-cap focused. Better signal-to-noise than its parent. |
| r/UndervaluedStonks ~20K | Tiny and value-oriented. Higher average post quality precisely because it is small. |
| r/biotech_stocks ~31K | Regulars often know the trial calendars better than the analysts covering the space. Similar sector subs exist for cannabis and mining. |
| r/wallstreetbets ~20M | Too big to be early. By the time a small name breaks through here, you are late. |
Read the comments, not the post. Anybody can write a bullish thesis; what matters is whether the room can find holes in it. Check the poster's history — an account that has posted about one ticker for two weeks is not an investor. And value the post that names its own risk.
ApeWisdom tracks mentions across these subs, free. The 24-hour change column is the only one that matters — absolute mentions just rediscover the mega-caps daily.
StockTwits
The trending page is free; the sentiment data now sits behind a paid tier. No great loss — the bull/bear ratio is self-reported tags from a self-selecting crowd, so it reads bullish on nearly everything. Use the free watcher count instead. A watcher count climbing on a name with no news is the real tell.
Long-form
On Seeking Alpha, follow the ticker rather than an author — following a symbol delivers new articles by email, which is the whole mechanism. And read the disclosure line: in 2017 the SEC charged 27 people and firms over bullish articles published on research sites without disclosing the writers were paid by the companies.
Substack has no way to track a ticker, and that's structural — no index, no symbol pages, every newsletter its own island. So the unit is the writer. When a good small-cap piece turns up, check whether that person writes regularly and subscribe. Five good writers beat a search tool that doesn't exist.
TradingView
Ideas is genuine sentiment: published charts tagged long or short, with reasoning and replies. A few appearing on a quiet small cap is the same tell as rising message volume.
The Strong Buy / Sell gauge is not sentiment. It's arithmetic on moving averages — no human opinion in it. Nor are the "sentiment" indicators in the script library, which are user-written formulas over price and volume. Read the Ideas tab and ignore the gauges.
Not worth the time
Quora has no ticker pages, so a company can't be watched, and answers surface by vote rather than recency. Telegram and Discord trading channels are frequently paid promotion end to end.
Spotting a promotion
The SEC's red flags for microcap promotion: promotional activity exceeding the company's actual product marketing; guaranteed returns; pressure to buy now; press releases announcing events that never materialise; heavy share issuance with no matching growth in assets; frequent changes of company name or business.
Paid promoters must legally disclose their compensation, and many do — in small print at the bottom. Reading the disclaimer is the fastest way to identify one.
The practical tell: chatter rising with no cause anyone can name. Nothing filed, nothing announced — but suddenly forty posts.
The protection is written exits, decided before entry. Sentiment gets you in early. It will never get you out.
The trap nobody mentions
A small company whose story is working will often sell stock into the enthusiasm. The company grows and your slice shrinks.
- An
S-3shelf registration is permission to issue, filed before it's used. Normal — but it's a loaded gun on the table. - An at-the-market agreement is worse, because it's continuous: a company can sell into your rally daily with no announcement until the next quarterly. Search its filings for at-the-market.
- A
424B5is the offering itself. One appearing the morning after good news is the good news being sold.
All free on EDGAR. Check for a live shelf before buying a catalyst, not after.
Biotech is a different game
No product, no revenue, no customers — Tier 2 is empty. What it has instead is a public calendar of dated events.
The registry
Every trial on ClinicalTrials.gov has a record history: a numbered, date-stamped list of every version of that record, at clinicaltrials.gov/study/<NCT ID>?tab=history. Sponsors amend these quietly, with no press release.
- "Recruiting" → "Active, not recruiting." Enrollment is complete; the readout clock has started.
- The primary endpoint wording changing. Rarely good news.
- Enrollment target cut, or completion date moving either way.
- New sites appearing — enrollment accelerating. Sites disappearing is the opposite.
The calendar
The FDA advisory committee calendar is free and authoritative. BioPharmCatalyst carries PDUFA dates, free for the first 150 events in date order and paid beyond that. But the FDA publishes no list of PDUFA dates, so every such calendar anywhere is a scrape of company press releases and carries wrong entries. Confirm against the company's own filing.
Orphan Drug has a real searchable FDA database, and a designation letter can predate the press release. Fast Track, Breakthrough and Priority Review have no database at all — which is exactly why they're tradeable press-release events. The company controls the reveal.
Two more worth knowing: FDA warning letters, because one issued to a contract manufacturer can sink an approval for a small company never named in it. And EMA's CHMP monthly agendas, which name the products up for opinion before the opinion exists.
- Dilution timed to the catalyst. Good news, spike, offering priced into the spike — often the same morning, at a discount, with warrants.
- The binary. A Phase 3 miss in a single-asset company routinely takes 70–90% off in one print. Position size is the only defence.
- Options are priced for it. Implied volatility is enormous into a known readout and collapses the moment it passes. A correct directional call can still lose money.
- Press releases engineered to omit statistics. No p-value, no confidence interval, no control arm. If the primary endpoint isn't stated plainly in the first two paragraphs, assume it missed.
- Reverse splits. Nasdaq closed the reset loophole — fail the $1 bid after a reverse split inside a year and there's no compliance period at all. A second split inside a year is close to terminal.
And one misunderstanding rather than a trap: an approval is not a revenue event. Launch and payer coverage take quarters. The going-concern language in the 10-Q says so in plain English.
Half an hour a week
- Start from a list you already have — a screen, a watchlist, your positions. Not a message board.
- OpenInsider cluster buys, last week. Cross-check. Overlap is the best free signal available.
- ApeWisdom 24h change and StockTwits watcher counts on those names only.
- Scan the Google Trends table for a small name near the top you don't recognise.
- Anything lighting up twice gets three checks: 8-K Item 5.02, Form 4, and EDGAR for a shelf.
- For a biotech, check the ClinicalTrials.gov record history for a quiet amendment.
None of this identifies good companies. It identifies attention arriving before the numbers do — which is a much narrower claim, and the reason the exits get written down first.
