Automatic Sales:  These are planned sales of their personal stock position as part of their personal financial strategies to liquidate some of their stock positions for personal reasons.

Option Exercise:  These are options that are awarded to high-level executives and board members (i.e., Directors) as incentives to remain with the company, especially in leaner, difficult times.  Every "Option Exercise at $0 per share" is essentially a grant of shares at the $0 value level.  Therefore, if they sold these shares, they could do so at the full market value on the day of sale.  Basically, these are part of these insiders' compensation packages that were negotiated for their participation and contribution to the company.  Most of the transactions that show "N/A" in the Value column are these share grants.  

Significant dollars could mean significant news:  In the Value column, when you see dollar amounts that are higher than $100,000, then you can assume these transactions warrant closer attention.  Looking at the past year for the most recent transactions, we see that Thomas Kilroy, Director, has been very actively selling his shares of stock, selling a total of more than 41,000 shares (i.e., valued at about $1.5 million) in February and March of 2010 alone.  So that raises a slight red flag in that we want to know who Thomas Kilroy is and what he does at Intel.  Is he possibly leaving the company, causing him to liquidate shares now?  Let's find out.  We went to Google and searched for Intel+"Thomas Kilroy"  We see under both Intel's own site, and on Morningstar.com, that he is currently the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel's Sales and Marketing Group.  We don't think this indicates a serious problem at Intel, especially since they just posted a strong quarter with upbeat Earnings Guidance, but we note it in our workbook nonetheless.

Who else?  Whoa.  We scroll down to see that another director, Reed Hundt (he is a Director at Intel and former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) between 1993-97), on the same day last August, 2009, bought and sold options he had valued at $18.63 a share.  Okay, now we see what happened.  Although two figures are recorded at over $2 million each, it is the difference between the two that he pocketed, or the much smaller amount of just about $200,000.  Nothing to worry about here.

Conclusion from our findings:  In the last 12 months, the rest of the insider transactions were mostly recorded options grants (i.e., "Option Exercise at $0 per share") or smaller stock sales.  There was only one outright Insider Buyer of stock and that was Reed Hunt again, who apparently took the proceeds from his option exercise and decided to buy back in at an even higher price, to buy 10,000 shares of Intel, at a cost of $202,900.  We say that is a very good sign indeed.  Very bullish.  But let's watch out for more on a weekly basis, checking back with the reporting of these insider transactions.  
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Next up, we learn about Stock Splits and the market psychology (and the reality) behind them.