COPY's insider-buying filter is a value edge

Value stocks have had a better 2026 than investors came in expecting, and advisors have responded by tilting portfolios toward the cheap stuff—only to face a harder question: which value strategy earns its keep. Tweedy, Browne's Insider + Value ETF (COPY) offers one answer: buy value companies whose insiders are buying, and let the corporate leaders do the research. Through July 31, the fund was up 20.30% year to date, according to ETF Trends, but a strong run in a value-friendly tape is not the same as a screen proven over a full cycle.

The logic is straightforward enough that it reads like a factor. Company owners and directors see marketing programs before they launch, know whether cost cuts are working, and have a view on what the business would fetch in a sale, so when they put their own money down—as Bob Wyckoff, Tweedy, Browne's managing director, puts it—the market should pay attention. That behavioral overlay fits value investing's contrarian bent, and it makes COPY an odd hybrid for advisors: an active ETF running a systematic, rules-based tilt that could just as easily be an index.

Tweedy, Browne has been running value strategies for more than a hundred years, a pedigree that matters in a category crowded with rule-based quant clones, and it is now part of the active manager wave testing the ETF wrapper's distribution advantages—advantages that have made the wrapper the industry's default vehicle. The fund is not simply buying cheap stocks; it is buying cheap stocks that the people who know them best are buying too. That double filter is what separates COPY from the many value ETFs that screen purely on price multiples.

The 20.30% return is a track record, but a short one, and the insider-buying screen is noisy: purchases stem as often from option exercises or diversification needs as from conviction, and the most informative trades are often the silent ones. Whether the filter catches value before the crowd does in a market that hasn't yet handed it a correction is the test still ahead. Advisors tilting now are making that bet before the test.