US Material Events Monitor

Stop scraping four sources. This actor pulls FDA drug approvals, SEC 8-K filings, $1M+ federal contract awards, and Form 4 insider transactions every run — normalized into a single JSON schema, ready for whatever downstream pipeline you're feeding.

What you get

Every event from every source comes out in the same shape:

{
  "source": "fda" | "sec_8k" | "federal_contracts" | "insider",
  "source_id": "stable unique ID per record",
  "event_type": "FDA Approval" | "8-K Filing" | "Contract Award" | "Insider Buy" | "Insider Sell",
  "ticker": "TKR or null",
  "company": "Company Name",
  "event_date": "2026-05-22",
  "summary": "human-readable one-line",
  "url": "primary source URL",
  "amount_usd": 12500000.0,
  "raw": { "...source-specific fields..." }
}

event_date is the truthful "this happened" date:

• FDA — approval status date
• SEC 8-K — filing date
• Federal contracts — last-modified date (not the original contract start, which can be decades old)
• Insider — Form 4 filing date

amount_usd is populated for contract awards and insider transactions (price × quantity). FDA approvals and 8-K filings don't carry a dollar value.

Sources

Source	What it covers	Notes
openFDA	NDA + BLA drug approvals (status AP, ORIG submissions + EFFICACY supplements)	Skips ANDA generics and routine housekeeping submissions — the noise that drowns out actual approvals.
SEC EDGAR	8-K filings (material events, leadership changes, M&A, bankruptcy, going concerns)	Pulled from EDGAR's full-text-search endpoint.
USAspending.gov	Federal contract awards above your $ threshold	Filtered by Action Date so you get contracts with recent activity, not just those whose period of performance started this week. Default threshold $1M; configurable up.
OpenInsider	Form 4 insider buy/sell transactions ≥ $25k	Both purchases and sales pulled.

Inputs

Field	Default	Notes
sources	all four	Subset by name: fda, sec_8k, federal_contracts, insider_trades
lookback_days	7	1–30. Window applied client-side; the larger you go, the more you'll be billed (PPR).
tickers	[]	Optional symbol whitelist. Empty = no filter.
keywords	[]	Optional case-insensitive substring filter applied to summary + company + event_type. Empty = no filter.
min_contract_usd	1000000	Federal-contracts only — minimum award value.
max_results_per_source	100	Hard cap. Use this to control PPR cost.

Use cases

• Daily monitoring digests for BD and competitive intelligence teams
• Sales-trigger pipelines for healthcare, biotech, defense CRMs
• Federal-contracts lead generation for GovCon vendors
• News-desk feeds for journalists covering biotech, defense, or financial markets
• Custom GPT grounding via tool-call
• Zapier / Make / n8n workflow inputs

What this actor is NOT

• Investment advice. This is a data pipe. Trade decisions are yours.
• Real-time. Pull-based, not push. Schedule it hourly or daily; you won't see filings within the first 30 seconds.
• Non-US. All four sources are US public-data only.
• A guarantee of completeness. Each source has its own coverage gaps. OpenInsider lags Form 4 filings by ~30 min. EDGAR full-text-search lags the actual filing by a few minutes.

Pricing

Pay-per-result. The first 50 results per month are free for every user. After that, you pay only for the events the actor actually returns — your tickers / keywords / min_contract_usd filters lower the bill, not raise it.

Example: pull everything in the last 3 days, only biotech

{
  "sources": ["fda", "sec_8k", "insider_trades"],
  "lookback_days": 3,
  "keywords": ["pharma", "biotech", "therapeutics", "FDA"],
  "max_results_per_source": 50
}

Schedule it

Apify's built-in scheduler runs this actor on whatever cron you want. Hook the dataset to a Zapier/Make webhook or pipe directly into your Postgres / Supabase / Slack via Apify integrations. No additional code on your side.

Caveats and known gotchas

• FDA submission_status_date can lag the public press release by 1-2 business days. If you're scraping for media coverage, you'll usually see the press release before this actor sees the approval.
• EDGAR 8-K filings include routine items. If you only care about M&A and going-concerns, filter on keywords: ["acquisition", "going concern", "departure", "Item 5.02", "Item 1.01", ...].
• OpenInsider scraping depends on their HTML staying stable. They've been stable since 2009, but if their layout changes, this actor will return zero insider events until I push a parser fix. File a Store issue and I'll patch within 48 hrs.
• Tickers on 8-K filings are sometimes missing when the filer is a holding company with no equity ticker, or when multiple share classes are listed.

Support

Found a bug? Hit an edge case? File an issue on the actor's Apify Store page. Patch turnaround target: 48 hrs for parser breaks, longer for new features.