06 — Market data
Section role
This section answers how the market is positioned in the stock and what the capital structure looks like in motion. It covers insider activity, institutional ownership, the options surface, short-interest history, credit-market positioning, the underlying price tape, and the buyback execution log. Where 05_financials is the company’s accounting truth, 06_market_data is the trading-side mirror.
What’s here
- insider transactions log — Form 4 / Form 5 chronology for every Section 16 officer and director, with sale type (10b5-1 vs. open-market), tax-withholding flag, and net-of-vesting interpretation.
- institutional holders — 13F top-holders snapshot, quarter-over-quarter delta, active vs. passive split, and concentration metrics. Pulled at each refresh.
- options chain — Implied-vol surface, term structure, put/call skew, open-interest hotspots, and event-pricing readout (earnings, analyst day, deal-close dates).
- short interest history — Bi-weekly short-interest, days-to-cover, and stock-loan rebate-rate proxy where available.
- credit market positioning — Bond-stack pricing, CDS spread (where traded), credit-rating actions (S&P / Moody’s / Fitch), and any drawn-revolver disclosures.
- stock price history — Adjusted-close price series with key event annotations (earnings beats / misses, deal announcements, broad-market regime shifts).
- share repurchases — Authorization vs. execution log; reconciles to the cash-flow line in capital returns.
Reading order
- For a 5-minute positioning read: stock price history → short interest history → options chain (implied-move section). You will know what the market is pricing.
- For ownership / sponsorship work: institutional holders → insider transactions log. Active-manager rotation is the leading indicator on analyst coverage revisions.
- For event setup: options chain term structure → relevant catalyst in catalysts.
- For capital-allocation execution: share repurchases cross-checked against capital returns and the buyback-authorization disclosures in board governance.
- For credit-cycle stress: credit market positioning paired with balance sheet debt tower.
Discipline reminder
Market-data files are time-sensitive by definition. Every series here must be date-stamped and re-pulled at each refresh — a six-week-stale options surface is misleading. Insider transactions must distinguish 10b5-1 plan executions from open-market discretion; conflating them is the most common interpretive error. Institutional-holder data lags ~45 days from quarter-end and must be flagged accordingly. Use the source log for the exact data vendor (EDGAR, NASDAQ TotalView, OPRA, FINRA) so freshness is auditable.
Cross-section pointers
- leadership — leadership equity context for insider transactions log.
- capital returns — accounting twin to share repurchases.
- comps valuation — multiple-based valuation that this section’s pricing data feeds.
- catalysts — events whose pricing is read out of options chain.
- source log — vendor registry for every series above.