SEC 8-K Event Monitor — CEO Exits, M&A, Bankruptcy & Cyber Alerts

One clean feed of new SEC 8-K filings, filtered by the material event you actually care about — pulled straight from EDGAR, the SEC's own system. Pick your items (5.02 officer departures, 2.01 completed M&A, 1.01 material agreements, 4.01 auditor changes, 1.03 bankruptcy, 1.05 cyber incidents…), schedule the actor, and every run emits only filings you have not seen before. No duplicate rows, no re-reading yesterday's news.

Built for:

• Traders & event-driven funds — a CEO exit, a completed acquisition or a 1.05 cyber disclosure is a tradeable event; get it as structured data minutes after it lands on EDGAR instead of waiting for a headline.
• M&A and credit analysts — 2.01 completions, 1.01 material agreements, 1.03 bankruptcies and 4.02 restatements across the whole US market, or narrowed to the names you cover.
• Journalists & researchers — auditor changes (4.01) and non-reliance restatements (4.02) are the classic early-warning pair, and this is the cheapest way to watch every filer for them at once.
• Sales & GTM intelligence — 5.02 filings name new officers the day they are appointed: new decision-maker, new budget, warm outreach.
• Compliance & risk teams — monitor your counterparties' CIKs for bankruptcy, delisting (3.01) and control changes (5.01).

Why this one

• The item filter is the product. Every 8-K carries official item codes; this actor filters on them before you pay for a row, and ships the human label alongside each code so 5.02 reads as "Departure/Election of Directors; Appointment/Compensation of Officers".
• Real diff semantics. State is the set of accession numbers already emitted — EDGAR's own permanent filing identity. A second run over the same window emits exactly zero rows, and a filing that was filtered out is never resurrected by later widening your item list.
• Whole market or a watch-list, and a watch-list is cheap. Tickers/CIKs are pushed into EDGAR's query itself, so watching 20 companies costs one small request — not a scan of every 8-K filed that week.
• No API key. EDGAR is open; the actor identifies itself with the userAgent you set, per the SEC's fair-access policy.

Example output

{
  "accessionNumber": "0001971213-26-000041",
  "cik": "0001971213",
  "ticker": "SBGI",
  "companyName": "Sinclair, Inc.",
  "formType": "8-K",
  "items": ["5.02", "9.01"],
  "itemLabels": [
    "Departure/Election of Directors; Appointment/Compensation of Officers",
    "Financial Statements and Exhibits"
  ],
  "filedAt": "2026-08-28",
  "periodOfReport": "2026-08-24",
  "filingUrl": "https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1971213/000197121326000041/sbgi-20260824.htm",
  "indexUrl": "https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1971213/000197121326000041/0001971213-26-000041-index.htm",
  "detectedAt": "2026-08-31T09:48:55Z"
}

• accessionNumber is EDGAR's permanent id for the filing — use it to dedupe downstream and to join against any other EDGAR dataset.
• items are the official codes as filed; itemLabels are the matching human labels, in the same order.
• filedAt is when the filing hit EDGAR; periodOfReport is the date of the event being reported (often a few days earlier).
• filingUrl opens the 8-K document itself, indexUrl the filing index page.
• ticker is null for filers with no listed ticker — trusts, ABS shells and non-traded funds file plenty of 8-Ks. It is never guessed.

Input options

Option	Default	What it does
items	1.01, 1.03, 1.05, 2.01, 4.01, 4.02, 5.01, 5.02	Which item codes count as a match. Full official 1.01–9.01 enum with labels in the run form. Empty list = every item
tickers	none	Watch-list of tickers (e.g. AAPL). Resolved against SEC's official ticker file; multi-class tickers like GOOG and BRK-B resolve correctly
ciks	none	Watch-list of CIK numbers, any zero-padding. Combined with tickers
formTypes	["8-K"]	Add 8-K/A to include amendments
sinceDays	3	Days of filings to scan by filing date. First run = your backfill
maxItems	500	Cap per run; anything over the cap emits on the next run
userAgent	placeholder	Please set this. SEC fair access requires a User-Agent identifying you, e.g. acme-research ops@acme.com

Leave tickers and ciks empty to monitor the entire US market.

How to use it

Schedule the actor and read each run's dataset:

1. Create an Apify Schedule — hourly on business days if you want events fast, daily if a morning digest is enough.
2. Pull GET /v2/acts/{actorId}/runs/last/dataset/items?status=SUCCEEDED after each run, or attach a webhook.

The first run backfills the sinceDays window. Every later run emits only never-seen filings, so you can run it as often as you like without paying for the same filing twice. sinceDays=3 gives you a comfortable safety margin: even if a scheduled run is skipped or fails, the next one still catches everything.

Honest notes:

• EDGAR only publishes on US business days. Weekends, US market holidays and the hours before ~06:00 ET legitimately return zero new filings. A zero-row run is a successful run, not a failure.
• Item codes come from EDGAR's index, not from reading the document. They are exactly what the filer tagged. An event mentioned only in the narrative of an 8.01 "Other Events" filing will not appear under a specific item — that is the filer's choice, and no monitor can invent it.
• A single window is capped at 10,000 filings (EDGAR's own search limit). A 30-day whole-market backfill measured ~5,900 8-Ks, so it fits; if you ever see a warning about the window being too large, narrow sinceDays or use a watch-list.
• Amendments are opt-in. 8-K/A filings are excluded unless you add them to formTypes, so a re-filed 8-K does not look like a fresh event.

Searches this actor answers: SEC 8-K monitor, 8-K item 5.02 alerts, CEO departure feed, M&A completion tracker, auditor change monitor, EDGAR 8-K API, material event alerts.

Reliability

• A rejected User-Agent fails the run with a message naming the exact input to fix — it never silently reports a quiet market.
• If EDGAR changes a field in its search index, the affected filing is skipped with one clear schema-drift warning and the rest of the run continues.
• If a watch-list cannot be resolved because SEC's ticker file is unavailable, the run fails rather than emitting zero and looking like a quiet day.
• Requests are paced well under the SEC's published rate limit, with exponential backoff on throttling and server errors.
• Schema verified against live EDGAR responses; item enum tracked against the SEC's official 8-K item list.

Pricing notes

You pay per new matching filing, plus a small per-company charge for the filers scanned in the window and a flat per-run start fee. Two consequences worth knowing:

• A quiet or fully-deduped run costs almost nothing — no matches, no per-filing charge.
• A watch-list run only scans your watch-list, so the per-company charge is a handful of companies rather than the whole market. Watching 20 tickers daily is a fraction of a cent in company checks.

Changelog

• 0.1 — initial release: full official 8-K item enum with human labels, item + watch-list filtering, server-side CIK filtering, ticker resolution (incl. multi-class tickers), seen-accession diff feed, 8-K/A opt-in.