For the U.S it has been shown that insiders and their imitators, on average, do not earn profits net of transaction costs. For Germany, we find that profitable insider trading is related to index membership. For the TecDAX, we find for purchases that insiders and imitators earn large and...

Existing time series of the returns on German stocks are either short or have weaknesses. We discuss the problems of creating such a time series and then report our monthly series based on all stocks in the top segment of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. We compare our return series with the...