Privately informed about firm fundamentals, corporate insiders detect activism-motivated trades better than other traders. This article solves the model of this novel form of insider trading motivated by noninsider information and presents empirical evidence. Corporate insiders preserve their ownership (restraining from selling or buying more) before activist interventions go public to benefit from price appreciation and to defend their private benefits of control. Surveillance technology facilitates response to predisclosure activist trading, especially when positive information about firm fundamentals is absent, supporting the mechanism that insiders attribute order flows to activist interest when speculation on fundamentals can be ruled out.

Using numeric and textual data extracted from over 50,000 finance articles in Social Science Research Network (SSRN) during 2001–19, we examine the relationship between measured qualities and a paper’s readership, eventual outlet, and impact. Conventionality (semantic similarity with existent research) helps boost readership and publication prospects. However, novelty in the forms of emerging topics and databases are associated with better publishing outcomes. Studies that do not easily map into established finance subfields or that introduce nonfinance elements face a higher hurdle. Finally, papers whose research questions span multiple fields are a hard sell, but those building on prior knowledge from multiple fields are valued.