Insider buying is a weak-to-moderate positive signal and insider selling is noisy; what matters is open-market purchases by operators, sized meaningfully against their salary, and clustered. Very low institutional ownership can mean undiscovered or uninvestable; very high means the marginal buyer must come from somewhere new.
Short interest, percent of float and days to cover are positioning data, not fundamental data — read them as fuel and friction, never as evidence.
Judge management by when they bought back stock: repurchasing at 25× in a boom and issuing at 8× in a crash is capital destruction, and it tells you how they will behave next cycle. The proxy statement says what they are paid to maximise, and incentives predict behaviour better than strategy slides. Beta measures sensitivity to the index, not the risk of permanent loss.
Educational, not investment advice.