SEC Corporate Catalyst & Insider Signal Radar

Turn new SEC filings into monitor-ready corporate event signals—without market-data subscriptions, external AI APIs, cookies, or private credentials.

In the production benchmark, the radar monitored 60 companies, discovered 2,128 supported filings in a 120-day window, sampled and parsed 330 filings with 100% parse success, produced 463 deterministic signals, and suppressed 100% of 2,128 duplicate candidates on the repeated scan.

What you get

The Actor follows a focused pipeline:

Ticker / CIK watchlist
→ official SEC EDGAR sources
→ accession-number deduplication
→ structured filing parser
→ deterministic event classification
→ prior-state comparison
→ evidence-backed signal

Use it as an SEC Filing Monitor, Form 4 Insider Trading tracker, SEC 8-K Monitor, 13D 13G Tracker, Insider Buying Monitor, Corporate Catalyst Monitor, or source for SEC Filing Alerts. It produces corporate-event intelligence, not investment advice.

Supported filing types

Filing	What is extracted
Form 4 / 4-A	Owners, roles, transaction code/date/security, shares, price, gross value, post-transaction ownership, direct/indirect ownership
8-K	Explicit item numbers plus narrow text evidence for agreements, acquisitions/dispositions, bankruptcy, delisting, financing, and executive changes
Schedule 13D / 13D-A	Reporting persons, issuer, beneficial shares and percent; factual ownership deltas with stronger control-intent context
Schedule 13G / 13G-A	Reporting persons, issuer, beneficial shares and percent; passive major-holder entries/exits and changes

The Actor accepts the familiar SC 13D/G input names and normalizes the SEC's newer SCHEDULE 13D/G structured filings to the stable output form names.

Modes

SNAPSHOT

Returns supported filings within lookbackDays and their parsed signals. It uses temporary comparison state during the run but never changes monitoring history.

MONITOR

Loads persistent state, identifies unseen accession numbers, emits only new evidence, and saves state safely. The first run establishes a non-billable baseline and intentionally emits no signals or filing records. Schedule it after that baseline run for incremental alerts.

Example input

{
  "companies": [
    { "inputId": "aapl", "ticker": "AAPL" },
    { "inputId": "tsla", "cik": "0001318605" }
  ],
  "monitorId": "executive-watchlist",
  "forms": ["8-K", "4", "SC 13D", "SC 13D/A", "SC 13G", "SC 13G/A"],
  "mode": "MONITOR",
  "lookbackDays": 7,
  "userAgent": "Your Company SEC Radar sec-contact@example.com"
}

inputId is preserved in every output record. Tickers are resolved with the SEC's official company ticker file. CIKs are normalized to ten digits.

monitorId partitions persistent history in a named key-value store. Actor Tasks use their task ID automatically when monitorId is empty; set an explicit stable value for independent watchlists started directly through the API.

Signal taxonomy

• Insider activity: INSIDER_BUY, INSIDER_SELL, INSIDER_OPTION_EXERCISE, INSIDER_GIFT, INSIDER_CLUSTER_BUYING, INSIDER_CLUSTER_SELLING
• Ownership: ACTIVIST_STAKE_NEW, ACTIVIST_STAKE_INCREASE, ACTIVIST_STAKE_DECREASE, MAJOR_HOLDER_ENTRY, MAJOR_HOLDER_EXIT
• Leadership: CEO_CHANGE, CFO_CHANGE, OTHER_EXECUTIVE_CHANGE
• Corporate events: ACQUISITION, ASSET_SALE, MATERIAL_AGREEMENT, CREDIT_AGREEMENT, DEBT_FINANCING, EQUITY_FINANCING, BANKRUPTCY_SIGNAL, DELISTING_RISK, OTHER_MATERIAL_8K_EVENT

No output contains BUY, SELL, LONG, SHORT, a target price, price prediction, or portfolio recommendation.

Form 4 transaction rules

The parser reads official ownership XML and preserves SEC transaction-code evidence:

Code	Interpretation	Signal treatment
P	Open-market purchase	INSIDER_BUY; eligible for buying clusters
S	Open-market sale	INSIDER_SELL; eligible for selling clusters
A	Grant/award	Parsed, but not mislabeled as an open-market buy and not emitted in the MVP taxonomy
M	Exercise/conversion	INSIDER_OPTION_EXERCISE; excluded from open-market clusters
G	Gift	INSIDER_GIFT; excluded from open-market clusters

grossValue is calculated only when both shares and price are valid. Missing facts remain null.

Insider clusters

A cluster requires at least 3 distinct insiders with qualifying P purchases—or qualifying S sales—within a 7-calendar-day window at the same issuer. Exact transaction fingerprints, repeated owners, grants, gifts, exercises, and duplicate amendments do not inflate the count.

Cluster output includes distinct insiders, transaction count, shares, known gross value, and window boundaries. Thresholds are centralized in src/cluster.ts for controlled future tuning.

Schedule 13D / 13G monitoring

The Actor uses the official SEC EDGAR full-text index to discover filings where the watched company is the filing subject, including filings submitted under an outside holder's CIK. It parses both legacy HTML and current structured Schedule 13 XML.

In MONITOR, the latest percentage or share count is stored by issuer/reporting-person key. Amendments emit only when comparable factual values change. A 13D is treated as stronger control-intent evidence than a 13G; a 13G is never relabeled as activism solely because its percentage is large.

8-K detection

Explicit 8-K item numbers are the primary classifier:

Item	Deterministic category
1.01	Material agreement; narrow cues distinguish credit or equity agreements
1.03	Bankruptcy/receivership
2.01	Acquisition or asset disposition, distinguished with narrow completion cues
2.03	Debt financing
3.01	Delisting/noncompliance risk
3.02	Unregistered equity financing
5.02	CEO, CFO, or other executive/director change

The Actor does not perform sentiment analysis. Concise matched text is retained only as secondary evidence.

Severity

Severity describes the operational materiality of the event category, not expected stock performance.

• CRITICAL: bankruptcy/receivership
• HIGH: delisting risk, control/major-holder changes, acquisitions or asset sales, CEO/CFO changes, financings, insider clusters, or an individual open-market transaction of at least $1 million
• MEDIUM: material agreements, other executive changes, or an individual open-market transaction of at least $100,000
• LOW: smaller insider transactions, gifts/exercises, and minor informational classifications

Rules are deterministic in src/severity.ts.

Output

The default Dataset contains three record types:

• SIGNAL — primary value; charged only after successful Dataset delivery
• FILING — minimal traceability metadata for a newly processed filing; never custom-charged
• ERROR — structured, company-scoped failure; never charged

Every signal has schemaVersion: "1.0", a stable signalId, an amendment-safe economicEventId, accession number, SEC URL, filing date, source form, deterministic severity, changeTypes, and evidence. Optional objects are consistently null; evidence lists are consistently arrays.

The OUTPUT key-value record contains summary counters designed for filters in n8n, Make, Zapier, or custom schedulers.

API usage

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/herazur~sec-corporate-catalyst-insider-radar/runs?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "companies": [{"inputId":"aapl","ticker":"AAPL"}],
    "mode":"MONITOR",
    "lookbackDays":7
  }'

After the run, consume Dataset items with recordType=SIGNAL, or read OUTPUT first and continue only when signalsGenerated > 0. In n8n/Make/Zapier, schedule the Actor, wait for completion, read OUTPUT, then route signals by signalType, severity, ticker, or inputId.

Scheduling recommendations

• Run the initial MONITOR once to establish the baseline.
• Schedule every 15–60 minutes for active watchlists, or daily for lower urgency.
• Keep the same monitorId, or leave it empty on a stable Actor Task so the task ID partitions monitoring history automatically.
• Use a stable inputId for downstream correlation.
• Provide a genuine SEC contact in userAgent or SEC_USER_AGENT.

Official data and fair access

The Actor uses only public SEC infrastructure:

• data.sec.gov/submissions/
• sec.gov/files/company_tickers.json
• efts.sec.gov/LATEST/search-index
• sec.gov/Archives/

Requests use an identifiable User-Agent, a global default limit of five requests per second (hard-capped at eight), bounded processing, connection reuse from Node's fetch, exponential backoff with jitter, and explicit handling for 403/429/5xx responses. The SEC publishes a ceiling of no more than ten requests per second; see SEC Developer Resources.

Pricing

The single custom PPE event is sec_signal_delivered. It is triggered once per successfully delivered, unique structured signal with the stable signal ID as the billing idempotency key. Baselines, lookups, raw metadata, duplicates, unsupported forms, parse errors, ERROR records, and FILING records are not custom-charged.

Based on the measured benchmark cost, the launch recommendation is $0.002 per signal ($2 per 1,000) before tier discounts, with a review after representative hosted production runs. Price is configured in Apify Console and is intentionally not hard-coded in the Actor.

Limitations

• This is deterministic event extraction, not legal, financial, or investment advice.
• 8-K classification covers the listed item categories only and does not attempt full-text semantic interpretation.
• Schedule 13 legacy HTML varies; missing percentages/shares produce no inferred change. Joint filers are represented as a stable semicolon-separated reporting-person group when structured XML supplies them.
• A holder name change between filings can prevent automatic comparison; the raw filing remains traceable.
• Schedule 13 discovery is bounded to the latest 100 matching EDGAR full-text results per watched CIK; exceptionally active issuers can require a shorter schedule interval.
• Form 4 code A grants are not emitted because the MVP taxonomy has no grant signal; they remain explicitly excluded from buying clusters.
• SEC availability, dissemination timing, corrected filings, and markup quality are outside the Actor's control.
• lookbackDays is capped at 365. This Actor is an event monitor, not a complete historical EDGAR bulk downloader.

Responsible usage

Respect SEC fair access, identify your organization honestly, avoid redundant schedules, and independently review the linked filing before making legal, governance, employment, or investment decisions.

Development

npm install
npm run validate
npm run benchmark
apify run --input-file examples/input.json

The repository includes 43 parser, state, amendment, schema, discovery, cluster, and billing tests; production Actor schemas; a Docker image; benchmark tooling; and Store listing copy.