There's an old investing maxim: watch what executives do, not what they say. The Tweedy, Browne Insider + Value ETF (COPY) takes that idea seriously, and the results have been impressive. Over the past year, COPY has delivered returns exceeding 30%, nearly doubling the S&P 500's roughly 16% gain during the same stretch.

The logic is simple enough. Corporate insiders typically know more about their companies than outside investors ever will. When executives and board members put their own money on the line, that's a signal worth paying attention to. It's one thing to talk about confidence in quarterly earnings calls; it's another to buy shares with your own cash.

COPY doesn't just chase every insider purchase that shows up in SEC filings. Instead, it focuses on sustained insider ownership over six months to three years, targeting companies where executives and directors maintain significant equity stakes. Rather than reacting to one-off transactions, the strategy looks for patterns of commitment and combines those signals with traditional value screens. It's a rules-based approach that sits somewhere between passive indexing and active stock picking, offering transparency and liquidity while incorporating behavioral insights.

Insider transactions are public information, filed with the SEC and available to anyone willing to dig through the data. But raw filings can be noisy and difficult to interpret without context. Investors typically need to understand transaction size, changes in ownership percentages, and whether multiple insiders are buying simultaneously before drawing meaningful conclusions. Tools that organize and filter this data in real time have made it easier to identify significant activity rather than routine, scheduled trades.

COPY is part of a broader shift in the ETF industry toward behavior-driven and ownership-based strategies. As traditional equity ETFs become increasingly commoditized, issuers are hunting for alternative signals to stand out. Insider alignment is one such signal, aiming to capture information that may not yet be fully reflected in stock prices while still offering ETF-level diversification.

Of course, insider buying doesn't guarantee future returns. Short performance periods can create misleading impressions, and even well-informed insiders can be wrong. But COPY's track record suggests that when insider data is properly filtered, contextualized, and combined with valuation discipline, it can form a compelling foundation for an ETF strategy in an increasingly crowded market.