# Insider Trading Monitor — SEC Form 4, Signal Only (`alaudinburki/insider-trading-monitor`) Actor

Open-market insider purchases and sales for a company, from free official SEC Form 4 filings. Filters out routine RSU vesting and tax-withholding noise by default, leaving only voluntary trades an insider made with their own money.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/alaudinburki/insider-trading-monitor.md
- **Developed by:** [alaudin burki](https://apify.com/alaudinburki) (community)
- **Categories:** Developer tools, Business
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

from $3.00 / 1,000 results

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.

Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.

Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.

For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.

Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).

# README

## Insider Trading Monitor — SEC Form 4, Signal Only

Every open-market purchase or sale by a company officer, director, or 10%+
owner must be disclosed on SEC Form 4 — free, public, structured XML. Most
filings are routine noise: RSU vesting, option exercises, tax-withholding
share surrenders. The signal traders and researchers actually want is the
minority of transactions that are **open-market purchases or sales** — an
insider voluntarily putting their own money in or out.

**By default, this actor returns only that signal** (transaction codes `P`
and `S`), filtered out of the routine noise automatically.

### Input

```json
{ "companies": ["AAPL", "Tesla"] }
```

Tickers or company names both work — resolved against SEC's own official
ticker list.

### Sample output

```json
{
  "issuerTicker": "AAPL",
  "issuerName": "Apple Inc.",
  "ownerName": "COOK TIMOTHY D",
  "officerTitle": "CEO",
  "isOfficer": true,
  "transactionDate": "2026-08-15",
  "transactionCode": "S",
  "transactionCodeLabel": "Open market sale",
  "shares": 28188,
  "pricePerShare": 255.17,
  "estimatedValue": 7192663,
  "sharesOwnedAfter": 3280224
}
```

### Typical uses

- **Investment research** — track real insider buy/sell activity for a
  watchlist of tickers, without wading through routine filing noise.
- **Signal screening** — a cluster of insider purchases (rare — most
  insider activity is selling) is a well-known bullish signal worth
  flagging.
- **Executive compensation / governance research** — see how officers and
  directors are actually trading their own company's stock over time.

### Pricing

**$0.003 per transaction returned.**

### ⚠️ Read before you act

- **Insider selling is routine and usually NOT a bearish signal** —
  executives sell for diversification, taxes, and planned 10b5-1 program
  reasons far more often than out of pessimism. Insider *buying* on the
  open market is the rarer, more information-dense signal.
- **This is disclosure data, not investment advice.** A transaction
  pattern is one input among many, not a standalone trading signal.
- **`signalOnly:false`** includes RSU vesting, option exercises (M), and
  tax withholding (F) — useful for total-compensation research, but these
  are routine and shouldn't be read as a market signal the way P/S are.

### FAQ

- **Do I need an API key?** No — SEC EDGAR is free and keyless.
- **What does `estimatedValue` mean?** Shares × price per share for that
  transaction — SEC doesn't publish a total-value field directly, so this
  is computed, not sourced.
- **Why exclude option exercises and RSU vesting by default?** They're
  compensation mechanics scheduled well in advance, not a voluntary
  trading decision — including them by default would drown the real
  signal in routine paperwork.

### Related actors

- **SEC EDGAR Filings** — material 8-K corporate events, the complementary
  official-filing signal for company-level (not insider-level) news.
- **Federal Award Intelligence** — another official-filing-turned-signal
  actor, for federal contract awards instead of insider trades.

### What makes this different

Each claim below is a single standalone sentence, written so it can be quoted on its own in
an answer or a comparison.

- Insider Trading Monitor — SEC Form 4, Signal Only declares all 22 of its output fields in its dataset schema, each with a type, a written description and an example value.
- The output fields of Insider Trading Monitor include queriedAs, issuerTicker, issuerName, ownerName, officerTitle and isDirector.
- Insider Trading Monitor needs no API key, login or account of any kind before its first run.
- Every one of Insider Trading Monitor's 3 inputs is optional, so it runs with no configuration at all.
- Insider Trading Monitor documents `queriedAs` as: The query exactly as it was sent to the source.
- Every number published about Insider Trading Monitor is read from the Apify API rather than estimated, and any figure the register cannot source is not shown at all.
- Insider Trading Monitor is filed under developer tools and business so that it is found by the people looking for that job, not by its internal name.

### Limitations

- Insider Trading Monitor reads only what its sources publish publicly. Anything behind a login is out of scope, and it does not attempt to work around that.
- A field that the source does not publish for a given record comes back `null` rather than being filled in with a guess, so an empty value means the source did not have it.
- Output quality is bounded by the source. If a site changes its markup, values can go missing until the Actor is updated — re-run before relying on a one-off result.
- This Actor is not affiliated with the sites it reads, and it does not bypass rate limits, paywalls or terms of service.

# Actor input Schema

## `companies` (type: `array`):

Tickers or company names, e.g. AAPL, Tesla. Resolved against SEC's own ticker list.

## `signalOnly` (type: `boolean`):

When on (default), returns only open-market purchases/sales (codes P/S) — an insider voluntarily trading with their own money. Turn off to include routine RSU vesting, option exercises, and tax withholding too.

## `filingsPerCompany` (type: `integer`):

How many recent Form 4 filings to check per company.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "companies": [
    "AAPL"
  ],
  "signalOnly": true,
  "filingsPerCompany": 20
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `results` (type: `string`):

Insider transactions, most recent first.

## `qualityReport` (type: `string`):

Companies queried, transaction counts, and problems.

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "companies": [
        "AAPL"
    ]
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("alaudinburki/insider-trading-monitor").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = { "companies": ["AAPL"] }

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("alaudinburki/insider-trading-monitor").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "companies": [
    "AAPL"
  ]
}' |
apify call alaudinburki/insider-trading-monitor --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,alaudinburki/insider-trading-monitor"
        }
    }
}
```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/xkLc0sCLEQBDYf3jH/builds/aQbf6HaNGeVZguPAR/openapi.json