Top Ranking CEOs, Redesigned Deal Metrics Page and a Whole Lot More

When looking at Google Analytics for InsideArbitrage recently, I was delighted to see that active users over the last month had jumped over 400% and so did new users. While I was thrilled to see these headline numbers, as investors we are trained to focus on what is going on underneath the hood and not on headlines.

Under the hood, I noticed that users were spending just 11 seconds per session on the site. Several years ago, I used to see engagement times of 2 to 3 minutes per session, which was better than benchmarks for similar sites. Over time that fell to 1 to 2 minutes, which wasn’t surprising. As our audience expanded and attention spans compressed in the age of social media, some decline was expected.

However, a nearly 90% drop in engagement time pointed to something other than shorter attention spans.

Bot Attack

The answer was all manner of bots. The ones Google, Open AI, Anthropic, and even individual enthusiasts are unleashing on independent publishers as they attempt to crawl fresh content on the public internet. Beyond the increase in server costs from the bot activity, we have also had to deal with site performance issues.

One method we tried to rescue the site over the last few weeks was to use a bot tracking and blocking system (both internally developed and using cyber security company products). We found ourselves in a long, drawn-out cat and mouse game. , which detracts from our primary business of providing investment research and tools.

Like many publishers, we have made the difficult decision to move some of our free content such as our monthly Buyback Wednesdays articles and our C-Suite Transitions articles behind the paywall. The scope of these articles has expanded significantly since we first started with them in 2022 and they are almost full research reports at this time.

We published 90 articles related to management changes and 110 articles about the most interesting stock buyback activity for free over a period of more than two years.

Going forward, our IA Plus, IA Premium and IA Professional subscribers will continue to receive this research by email and can access these articles on the website. I hope that you will consider subscribing to support our work.

If you’re an event-driven investor, our research and tools are designed to help you find opportunities and ramp up on research faster. Choose IA Plus if you want the research. Choose IA Premium or IA Professional if you want the full toolkit.

New Upgrades

Our last upgrade to the InsideArbitrage platform was in October and I discussed the launch of a new CVR database, a Shareholder Activist Tool, an Insider Performance Score (IPS), and a Reverse Splits Tracker that were rolled into a Professional plan for institutional investors.

Today we are happy to announce another upgrade to the platform that includes:

• A management performance tool that lets IA Premium and IA Professional members track the performance of C-suite executives across various time periods after they join a company. A new CEO should be able to start turning around a troubled company in a few quarters, while a behemoth like Intel (INTC) or General Electric (GE) could require years before results become evident in the stock price. It is not always a CEO change that triggers positive change and in the case of a healthcare services company, we saw a CFO make a huge impact by using a new way to submit claims to insurance companies. This new tool lets you pick specific C-suite roles and find the best operators as measured by the performance of the stock after they joined the company.

• At the end of 2025, we sunset our income-focused Yield Guru service because my friend Shailesh who was leading the service had to wrap it up for personal reasons. By the time he wrapped up the service, it had generated gains of 12% (time-weighted returns would have likely been higher) and closed positions generated a return of about 25% (over 47% annualized). We had built certain tools for the service such as the ability to track Insider Buying in Preferred Stocks and an updated list of Special Dividends, which we will now be rolling into our IA Professional plan.

• IA Premium and IA Professional members also benefit from our AI tools, which will be updated next week with new models from Google, Open AI, Anthropic and Perplexity. For example, if you are looking at an insider purchase such as the one in the screenshot below and are curious about the insider’s background, you can click on their name and load an AI generated “elevator pitch”. Once the pitch loads, you can pick one of multiple AI models to ask further questions, or better yet, ask your question to all four models simultaneously.

• We have also redesigned the Merger Arbitrage Tool (MAT) and the Deal Metrics page for IA Premium and IA Professional members. The MAT now loads faster, has a search feature, includes a CVR filter and more.

Sunsetting Conference Call Transcripts

A little over two years after acquiring the site Conference Call Transcripts, we have decided to sunset it next week. The acquisition didn’t quite play out the way we expected but it taught us a lot and got us prepared for new acquisitions when opportunities came our way. When the founder of The Special Situations Report substack was ready to move on and reach out to me, we were ready to move quickly to complete that acquisition. This second acquisition worked out great and by the end of this year I expect it to generate enough revenue to have paid for both acquisitions.

Updated Terms and Conditions

When we launched our updated IA Professional service last October, we were pleasantly surprised to see the response from subscribers. In addition to the positive response, we also saw some sign ups that were immediately blocked by our payment processor Stripe because they appeared suspicious. I realized that these blocked subscriptions were done with gift cards and by users who were trying to abuse our immediate prorated refund policy to potentially move/launder money.

To prevent these attempts and stop the unauthorized exploitation of our proprietary data via immediate sign-up and cancellation, we are updating our terms and conditions. The minimum subscription period going forward will be at least one month.

Try it for a month and see if it earns its keep.

Check out full Terms and Conditions here.