Thursday, January 12, 2012

Tracking Insider Ownership In Canada

This post is aimed at investors in Canadian stocks, so for the 80% of you that ignore this market, you can skip now.

You don't see who the significant shareholders are (and how their holdings have changed) when you look up the filings of Canadian issuers on Sedar. That's not because insiders are not required to report their holdings or changes to their holdings. It's because there is a separate reporting system just for this purpose.

On SEDI, you can find information relating to insider transactions by issuer or by insider, making it a rather powerful tool. Insiders include (by definition, through National Instrument 55-104) shareholders who own more than 10% of a security.

So if you want to know if a senior manager has been buying up shares, or who the significant shareholders are of a company you own, it's easy to find out.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The data is there, but it's hard to get. The SEDI interface is so user-unfriendly! It takes anywhere from 15 to 25 steps to get any info out of the system, and the output is difficult to read. A big IT project turned bad!

www.canadianinsider.com is the only one I know that tries to make it simpler on their website or through more elaborate reports available through some brokers.

indievestments said...

Saj, this is great info. I've been looking for insider ownership in canada today and it led me to your blog post!

Cheers.

Mike Arnold
m1kearnold.com
indievestments.com