John D. Spears, a managing director of Tweedy, Browne, sat down with WealthTrack’s Consuelo Mack at the 2026 Ben Graham Conference, hosted by CFA Society New York, to explain an unlikely move for a firm steeped in Ben Graham’s tradition: launching its first ETFs, built around tracking the share purchases of corporate insiders. Tweedy, Browne was Graham’s broker and later Warren Buffett’s, which made the firm’s first foray into a rules-based, quantitative product notable in itself.
The Logic of Following Insiders
Spears said the appeal of insider buying has always been common sense. Decades ago the firm received monthly paper summaries of insider transactions from the SEC and combed them by hand, on the logic that the people running a business know more about it than anyone, and when they open their own wallets to buy stock they expect it to go up. Insiders, he added, can also make things happen, spinning out fast-growing divisions or selling the company, and have a better sense of when their own shares are cheap.
He pointed to academic work as the foundation, citing a University of Michigan study of top-executive purchases that found insiders buying in the cheapest quintile on price-to-book, P/E and dividend yield beat the benchmark by about ten percentage points. Tweedy, Browne built its own datasets going back roughly two decades, in the United States and then internationally, and found the same result: insiders buying cheap stocks tended to outperform by around 10% above the benchmark.
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