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A biotech director just spent $18 million of his own money on his own company's stock this week — in three separate purchases, none pre-scheduled. When someone writes eight-figure personal checks, I read the filing twice.

$SRZN (Surrozen, small biotech): Tim Kutzkey, a board member, bought $6.4M on Oct 20. Then $6.0M more. Then $5.6M more. Same person, same day, no pre-scheduled trading plan. That's not portfolio housekeeping — that's someone deciding, deliberately, three times.

For context: board members usually buy in five or six figures and issue a press release about it. Kutzkey skipped the press release and went straight to eight figures. Board members see the board packets. They know things the filings don't say yet.

$BPRE (Bluerock, private real estate fund): Ramin Kamfar, a director, bought $1.4M on Oct 21, on top of $1.1M the day before. About $2.5M total, open-market conviction. His track record: right 2 out of 3 times on past buys — but the average return was slightly negative. Ri

Kamfar's record is a good reminder of why I publish the misses: a 67% hit rate with a negative average return tells you frequency and magnitude are different animals. Anyone quoting only the hit rate is selling something.

What got filtered out today: 25 automated purchases and 30 buys too small to mean anything. An executive whose salary covers the trade in a week isn't signaling conviction. He's rebalancing. Different activity entirely.

The long view: since 2020 I've flagged 45,710 insider buys like these. 45.3% beat the market the following week. Average return across ALL of them: +3.71% — dragged up by a few big winners, because that's the whole point of a filter like this. The median buy did nothing.