Form 4 Insider Trades Watch: Buys & Sells

Unofficial; not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This Actor reads public Form 4 filings from the SEC's EDGAR archive (daily index files, each filing's folder listing and its Form 4 XML) with a declared User-Agent at a polite request rate. Data only; not investment advice.

Insider buys and sells as flat rows. When a director, officer or 10% owner of a US-listed company buys, sells, exercises options or receives a grant, they report it on a Form 4, due within two business days of the trade. Form 4 Insider Trades Watch turns each new filing into one row per transaction: company and ticker, insider name and role (director, officer with title, 10% owner), transaction date and code with its plain-English meaning, shares, price, value (shares × price), shares owned afterwards, direct or indirect ownership, the footnotes for that transaction, whether the trade was made under a Rule 10b5-1 plan, and a link to the filing. Run it on a schedule with Only new on and every run outputs just the transactions you have not seen.

By default you get open-market and private purchases and sales (codes P and S). Add any other codes (grants, option exercises, tax withholding, gifts...) and the derivative table (options, RSUs, warrants) when you need them.

Who uses it

• Investors and analysts following insider buying at companies they own or watch, or screening the whole market for sizeable director and officer purchases.
• Newsletter writers and researchers who need a clean daily feed of insider activity by ticker, role and size.
• Compliance and IR teams keeping an eye on filings by their own insiders or a peer group.
• Data teams loading insider transactions into a warehouse, Sheets or a dashboard without parsing XML.

What you get

One row per transaction, flat fields, CSV-friendly. Below is a real row from a test run (Apple Inc., Form 4 filed 2026-10-19; one of several sales the officer reported in the same filing):

{
  "accessionNumber": "0001140361-26-040126",
  "rowIndex": 2,
  "formType": "4",
  "isAmendment": false,
  "dateOfOriginalSubmission": null,
  "filedDate": "2026-10-19",
  "periodOfReport": "2026-10-15",
  "issuerCik": "320193",
  "issuerName": "Apple Inc.",
  "ticker": "AAPL",
  "reportingOwnerCik": "2050912",
  "reportingOwnerName": "Parekh Kevan",
  "isDirector": false,
  "isOfficer": true,
  "officerTitle": "Senior Vice President, CFO",
  "isTenPercentOwner": false,
  "isOther": false,
  "otherRelationship": null,
  "securityTitle": "Common Stock",
  "transactionDate": "2026-10-16",
  "transactionCode": "S",
  "transactionCodeText": "Open-market or private sale",
  "acquiredDisposed": "D",
  "shares": 200,
  "pricePerShare": 342.66,
  "value": 68532,
  "sharesOwnedAfter": 18731,
  "directOrIndirect": "D",
  "natureOfOwnership": null,
  "isDerivative": false,
  "conversionOrExercisePrice": null,
  "exerciseDate": null,
  "expirationDate": null,
  "underlyingSecurityTitle": null,
  "underlyingShares": null,
  "footnotes": "F3: This transaction was made pursuant to a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan adopted by the reporting person on November 21, 2025. | F4: This transaction was executed in multiple trades at prices ranging from $342.25 to $342.88; the price reported above reflects the weighted average sale price. ...",
  "is10b5_1Plan": true,
  "filingIndexUrl": "https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/000114036126040126/0001140361-26-040126-index.htm",
  "xmlUrl": "https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/000114036126040126/form4.xml",
  "isNew": true,
  "fetchedAt": "2026-10-22T05:08:04.999Z",
  "source": "www.sec.gov Archives, Form 4 ownership XML (public filing data)"
}

(The footnote text is shortened here; the dataset holds it in full.)

Notes on the columns:

• value is shares × pricePerShare in US dollars, rounded to cents. It is null when the filing gives no price (some filers put the price only in a footnote). Grants and option exercises often carry a price of 0, so their value is 0.
• transactionCode is the Form 4 code (P, S, A, M, F, G...); transactionCodeText spells it out. acquiredDisposed is A or D.
• footnotes holds only the footnotes the transaction refers to, as F1: ... | F2: .... Weighted-average price ranges, 10b5-1 plan dates and ownership explanations usually live here.
• is10b5_1Plan is true when the filing's Rule 10b5-1 checkbox (on the form since 2023) is ticked or one of the transaction's footnotes says the trade was under a 10b5-1 plan, false when the checkbox is present and unticked, null when the filing has neither.
• Joint filings (for example a fund and its manager) list several owners: reportingOwnerName and reportingOwnerCik join them with ; and a role flag is true when any of them has the role.
• Derivative rows (isDerivative: true, only with Include derivative transactions) add conversionOrExercisePrice, exerciseDate, expirationDate, underlyingSecurityTitle and underlyingShares.
• accessionNumber + rowIndex identify a row uniquely. Empty values are null, never empty strings.

A RUN_SUMMARY record in the run's key-value store has the counts: index days read and missing, Form 4 filings in the index, filings skipped by ticker before download, filings downloaded, rows filtered out by which filter, errors, requests used and why the run stopped.

How to use it

1. Pick companies, or the whole market. Enter Tickers (AAPL, MSFT...) or Issuer CIKs. Only those companies' filings are downloaded, so watch runs are small and quick. Leave both empty to scan the whole market.
2. Pick what counts. Keep the default P and S codes for buys and sells, or choose others. Narrow by Insider roles and Minimum transaction value.
3. Name the watch. watchName is the memory key; use one per saved search. The first run of a new watch returns everything that matches in the window (up to Max items); from then on, only transactions not output before.
4. Schedule it. Add a daily schedule in Apify with daysBack 1. Each day's index file appears in the evening (US Eastern), so a morning run picks up the previous business day's filings.
5. Connect the output. Send the dataset to Google Sheets, Slack, email, webhooks, Zapier, Make, n8n or your own API with Apify integrations. Quiet runs push nothing.

Example 1: Buys and sells at big tech companies

{
  "tickers": ["AAPL", "MSFT", "NVDA", "TSLA", "AMZN", "GOOGL", "META"],
  "daysBack": 1,
  "transactionCodes": ["P", "S"],
  "watchName": "big-tech",
  "maxItems": 200
}

Example 2: Whole market, director and officer purchases of $100,000 or more

{
  "daysBack": 1,
  "transactionCodes": ["P"],
  "minTransactionValue": 100000,
  "insiderRoles": ["director", "officer"],
  "watchName": "insider-buying-100k",
  "maxItems": 200,
  "maxFilingsScanned": 1500
}

Example 3: Option exercises and the sales and tax withholding around them, with the option rows

{
  "tickers": ["NVDA", "AVGO", "AMD"],
  "daysBack": 5,
  "transactionCodes": ["M", "S", "F"],
  "includeDerivative": true,
  "includeAmendments": true,
  "watchName": "chip-option-exercises",
  "maxItems": 300
}

Input reference

Field	Type	Default	What it does
tickers	string[]	[]	Stock symbols. Mapped to issuer CIKs with the SEC's public company ticker file and applied to the daily index before any download.
issuerCiks	string[]	[]	Issuer CIKs, for companies without a ticker. Combined with tickers.
daysBack	int 1–10	1	Past business days of daily index files to read, plus today's index if already published.
transactionCodes	enum[]	["P","S"]	Form 4 codes to output. An empty list means every code.
onlyOpenMarket	bool	false	Shortcut for codes P and S only, overriding transactionCodes.
minTransactionValue	int USD	none	Minimum shares × price. Rows without a price are left out when set.
insiderRoles	enum[]	all	director, officer, tenPercentOwner, other; any match counts.
includeDerivative	bool	false	Also output derivative-table rows (options, RSUs, warrants, convertibles).
includeAmendments	bool	false	Also read 4/A amendments.
onlyNew	bool	true	Output only transactions this watch has not output before.
watchName	string	"default"	Memory key; stored in the named key-value store form4-watch-<name>.
maxItems	int 1–5000	200	Hard cap on rows per run; the rest is left for the next run.
maxFilingsScanned	int 1–5000	300	Hard cap on filings downloaded per run, so whole-market runs stay short.
userAgentContact	string	none	Optional contact (your e-mail) for the User-Agent header sent to www.sec.gov.

Pricing

Pay per event. You pay for rows actually delivered, plus a small start fee.

Event	Price	When
Actor start	$0.005	Once per run, even when nothing is new
transaction	$0.003	Per row in the dataset (one transaction)

What a typical watch costs. A daily watch on a handful of tickers that averages 5 new transactions a day: 5 × $0.003 + $0.005 = $0.02 a day, about $0.60 a month. A quiet day costs $0.005. A whole-market feed of 50 transactions a day costs about $0.155 a day. Compute is included, there are no proxy charges, and the run stops itself before exceeding the spending limit you set on the run (Maximum cost per run in Apify). Filtered-out transactions are never charged.

Data source and how the Actor behaves

Source: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR Form 4 filings (public information). The SEC states that information presented on sec.gov is public information that may be copied or further distributed, and asks for appropriate citation of the SEC as the source.

The Actor reads only documented, machine-readable files: the daily form index (/Archives/edgar/daily-index/YYYY/QTRn/form.YYYYMMDD.idx, one request per business day), the company ticker file (/files/company_tickers.json, one request, only when you enter tickers), and for each Form 4 it needs, the filing folder's index.json and the Form 4 XML it lists (two requests per filing). It does not crawl web pages, does not log in and does not use a browser. Requests carry a declared User-Agent (Form4InsiderWatch/0.1 ..., with your contact if you provide one) and accept gzip, are spaced at 5 per second (half the SEC's published ceiling of 10), time out after 30 s, and transient errors (429, 5xx, network) are retried at most 3 times with backoff. If the site's automated-traffic guard answers, the run stops cleanly, keeps the rows already pushed and tells you to wait before the next run.

A Form 4 is listed in the daily index once per filer (under the company and under each insider), so the Actor groups those lines by accession number and downloads each filing once. If one filing's XML does not look like a Form 4, that filing is skipped and counted in errors; the run continues and tries it again next time. If the daily index itself no longer matches the documented layout, the run fails with a clear message instead of emitting empty results.

Timing. Rows appear after the SEC publishes the filing in its daily index, which happens in the evening (US Eastern) of the day the filing was made. Insiders have two business days after a trade to file. So a trade usually shows up in this Actor one to three business days after it happened. This is not a live feed.

People named in filings. Insider names, CIKs and roles are what the filer reported publicly on the form; the Actor outputs them as filed and nothing more.

Limitations

• Whole-market runs. Without tickers, a single business day has hundreds of Form 4 filings and can exceed 1,000 on busy days (in our test week, 210 to 480 a day), most of them grants, option exercises and tax withholding. Every filing has to be downloaded to see its codes, so maxFilingsScanned (default 300) caps the downloads per run. The filings beyond the cap are left for the next run, but a daily schedule with daysBack 1 moves on to the next day: for a complete whole-market feed set maxFilingsScanned to 1500 or daysBack to 2.
• Purchases (code P) are rare compared with sales and grants; a whole-market day may have only a handful, often clustered in a few filings.
• P and S cover open-market and private purchases and sales, as the form defines them.
• Prices are per share as filed. Many filers report a weighted average price and give the range in a footnote.
• The daily index lists filings alphabetically by filer. With a low maxItems or maxFilingsScanned the run stops part-way through a day; the next run continues where the watch left off, row by row.
• The first run of a new watchName reports everything in the window as new. That is expected; lower daysBack or maxItems if you prefer.
• The watch memory lives in a named key-value store in your account called form4-watch-<watchName>. Deleting it resets the watch. Filings not seen for 180 days are forgotten automatically.
• Tickers come from the SEC's company ticker file, which lists current symbols. Delisted or renamed symbols may not resolve; use issuerCiks for those. Unknown tickers are listed in RUN_SUMMARY.
• Holdings rows (positions reported without a transaction) are not output.

Integrations and automation

Works with every Apify integration: schedules, webhooks, Google Sheets, Slack, email, Zapier, Make, n8n, LangChain and the Apify API and MCP server. Because the output is already the delta, a "new dataset items" trigger maps one-to-one to "new insider transactions".

Typical pipelines:

• Slack alert on insider buying: daily at 8 am, codes P, minimum value $50,000; post ticker, reportingOwnerName, officerTitle, shares, pricePerShare, value and filingIndexUrl.
• Watchlist sheet: append rows for your tickers to Google Sheets and pivot by insider or by month.
• Warehouse: load the dataset into BigQuery or Postgres keyed on accessionNumber + rowIndex.

FAQ

Is this investment advice? No. The Actor delivers data as filed. Insider transactions have many reasons (taxes, diversification, pre-arranged 10b5-1 plans) and say nothing on their own about future prices.

Is this data legal to use? Form 4 filings are public records published by the SEC, which states the information may be copied and further distributed with appropriate citation. You remain responsible for how you use the data.

Why is a trade I read about missing? It may not have been filed yet (two business days after the trade), the day's index may not be published yet, it may be an amendment (turn on includeAmendments), a derivative row (turn on includeDerivative), another code, or your filters, maxItems or maxFilingsScanned left it out. Check RUN_SUMMARY for the counts.

Why does one filing give several rows? Each transaction line on the form is a row. Large sales are often reported as many lines at different prices.

What do P and S cover that A, M and F do not? P and S are purchases and sales. A is a grant or award from the company, M an option exercise or conversion, F shares withheld to pay the exercise price or tax. Those are usually not trading decisions, which is why they are off by default.

Can I track several watchlists? Yes. Give each its own watchName; each keeps its own memory.

Support

Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab in Apify Console with your input and run ID. Feature requests welcome, especially new filters or output fields.