SEC Insider Trades Scraper — Form 4 buys & sells as flat rows

Reads SEC EDGAR ownership filings (Forms 3, 4 and 5) straight from the SEC's own keyless endpoints and returns one flat row per reported transaction — not one row per filing, and not a PDF link you still have to parse.

Give it tickers (AAPL, NVDA) or raw CIK numbers. Tickers are resolved against SEC's official company_tickers.json map, so an unlisted ticker is skipped with a warning instead of silently returning nothing.

Why this one

• Parsed transactions, not filing lists. Most EDGAR Actors hand you an index of 10-K/10-Q/8-K filings. This one opens the raw ownership XML behind each Form 4 and pulls out the trade: who, what role, which code, how many shares, at what price, how many held afterwards.
• transactionCode is decoded. S → Open-market sale, F → Shares withheld for taxes, M → Option exercise/conversion, and so on for all 17 codes. The distinction matters: a large F or M row is routine compensation mechanics, not a bearish signal, and treating every disposition as "insider selling" is the single most common mistake in this dataset.
• transactionValueUsd is signed and pre-computed — negative on a disposition, positive on an acquisition — so you can sum a column without re-deriving the sign from acquiredOrDisposed.
• Rule 10b5-1 flag and footnotes are carried through, which is how you tell a pre-scheduled plan sale from a discretionary one.
• No personal addresses. The ownership XML contains the reporting person's street address. This Actor deliberately never emits it. Names, CIKs, roles and officer titles are the public corporate disclosure; the address block is personal data and is not part of this product.
• No API key, no start fee, HTTP only (no headless browser), pay only per transaction row.

Output fields

id, accessionNumber, formType, filingDate, periodOfReport, issuerName, issuerCik, ticker, insiderName, insiderCik, isDirector, isOfficer, isTenPercentOwner, isOther, officerTitle, coFilers, derivative, securityTitle, transactionDate, transactionCode, transactionCodeMeaning, acquiredOrDisposed, shares, pricePerShare, transactionValueUsd, sharesOwnedAfter, directOrIndirect, indirectOwnershipNature, exercisePrice, expirationDate, underlyingSecurityTitle, underlyingShares, rule10b5_1Plan, footnotes, filingUrl, url.

Derivative rows (options, RSUs, convertibles) carry exercisePrice, expirationDate, underlyingSecurityTitle and underlyingShares; non-derivative common-stock rows leave them null. Set includeDerivative: false to get common stock only.

Sample row

{
  "id": "0001140361-26-037020-n0",
  "accessionNumber": "0001140361-26-037020",
  "formType": "4",
  "filingDate": "2026-09-17",
  "periodOfReport": "2026-09-15",
  "issuerName": "Apple Inc.",
  "ticker": "AAPL",
  "insiderName": "Newstead Jennifer",
  "isOfficer": true,
  "officerTitle": "SVP, GC and Government Affairs",
  "derivative": false,
  "securityTitle": "Common Stock",
  "transactionDate": "2026-09-15",
  "transactionCode": "S",
  "transactionCodeMeaning": "Open-market sale",
  "acquiredOrDisposed": "D",
  "shares": 1438,
  "pricePerShare": 330.19,
  "transactionValueUsd": -474813.22,
  "sharesOwnedAfter": 32914,
  "rule10b5_1Plan": true,
  "footnotes": "This transaction was made pursuant to a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan adopted by the reporting person on May 5, 2026."
}

Notes on the source

• Form 3 is an initial statement of holdings and Form 5 an annual catch-up; both are largely holdings rather than open-market trades, so a Form 3 often yields zero transaction rows. That is the filing, not a bug.
• A filing can be made jointly by several reporting persons. The first is used for the insiderName/role fields and the rest are listed in coFilers rather than dropped.
• SEC's filing index is newest-first, so sinceDate stops paging as soon as it passes the date.
• Measured across 160 real Form 4 transactions from 11 large-cap issuers (MSFT, ADBE, ORCL, CRM, NOW, IBM, META, TSLA, AMZN, GOOGL, NVDA): exercisePrice was populated on 15/33 (45%) of derivative rows — the rest were RSU vests, which have no strike price — while expirationDate and coFilers were both 0% in this sample. RSU-heavy mega-cap grants rarely carry an expiration date, and none of the 11 issuers sampled had a jointly-filed Form 4 in the window checked; both fields do populate on option grants and family/trust co-ownership filings, just not reliably at large tech issuers. Set includeDerivative: false if you only need the common-stock rows.

Related guides

• All FetchSmith tools: https://fetchsmith.com/tools

Source code: https://github.com/Fetchsmith/fetchsmith/tree/main/actors/sec-insider-trades-scraper