Rule 144 Volume Caps: One Percent of Shares or the Four-Week Average
A ceiling filed before the trade, not a print after it An EDGAR alert lands at 4:41 p.m. Eastern: Form 144, an officer you recognize, 250,000 shares. Nothing in that filing said a share had changed hands. A Form 144 is a notice of proposed sale. It states a ceiling the seller has calculated and a sale the seller intends, not an execution. That gap is the same one that makes corporate filings easy to misread on a screen showing only prices. A 13F is a position list as of a quarter-end date that has already passed, which is the point of Read a 13F as a Quarter-End Snapshot, Not a Current Position List . A buyback press release announces an authorization, not a purchase. A Form 144 announces a permitted quantity, not a filled order. What makes Rule 144 worth an afternoon is that the permitted quantity is not discretionary. It is an arithmetic result produced by two numbers that are public before the filing exists: the issuer's share count and four calendar weeks of consolidated ...