SEC Form 4 Monitor — Real-Time Insider Trading Alerts to Slack, Discord & Telegram

Get push notifications the moment a corporate insider files a Form 4 with the SEC. Watch any list of US-listed tickers and receive alerts on Slack, Discord, Telegram, or any webhook within minutes of the filing hitting EDGAR. A modern, programmable alternative to OpenInsider, QuiverQuant, InsiderFinance, and SECForm4.com — but built for engineers, traders, and quant teams who want push alerts and clean JSON, not yet another dashboard to refresh.

TL;DR: SEC Form 4 filings are public, free, and goldmine signal — but no free site pushes them to your channel of choice in real time. This actor does, and you only pay per alert delivered.

What does SEC Form 4 Monitor do?

This actor watches the public SEC EDGAR Form 4 feed — the filings every officer, director, and 10%-owner must submit within 2 business days of trading their company's stock — and pushes a structured alert to your Slack, Discord, or Telegram every time an insider on your watchlist transacts. It parses each filing's XML to extract the insider's name, title, transaction code (P/S/A/M/F), share count, and price, calculates the dollar value, applies your filters, and delivers a clean alert with a direct link to the SEC filing.

Insider buying clusters and large CEO sells are some of the highest-signal events in equity markets. Hedge funds pay tens of thousands per month for the same data through Bloomberg terminals (BIQ <GO>), FactSet, S&P Capital IQ, or specialized providers like WhaleWisdom, VerityData/InsiderScore, or 2iQ Research. This actor delivers the underlying SEC data for cents per alert, with the same latency.

What this actor solves

• Push notifications the moment an insider trades — not next-day email digests
• Custom watchlists — track only the tickers you care about
• Programmatic access to Form 4 data — clean JSON, dataset export, webhook out
• Direct EDGAR XML parsing — actual share counts, prices, transaction codes, not a screenshot
• Pipe to your own backend — feed an LLM, a trading bot, a database, or a Discord
• Minutes-fresh data — within ~1 polling interval of the SEC accepting the filing

Why use SEC Form 4 Monitor instead of free dashboards or paid Bloomberg?

	Free sites (OpenInsider, Finviz, SECForm4.com)	Paid platforms (Bloomberg, WhaleWisdom, VerityData)	SEC Form 4 Monitor
Cost	Free, ad-supported	$24K–$300K/year	~$0.10 per alert delivered
Push alerts to your channel	❌ (manual refresh)	✅ (custom integrations $$$)	✅ Slack, Discord, Telegram, webhook
Watchlist filtering	Limited	✅	✅
Min transaction-value filter	❌	✅	✅
Buy/sell/grant code filtering	Partial	✅	✅
JSON dataset for backtesting	❌	✅	✅
No dashboard required	❌	❌	✅
Pay only when something happens	n/a	❌ (flat fee)	✅
Self-hosted / programmable	❌	Limited	✅

If you're tired of refreshing OpenInsider every morning, paying for a Bloomberg you don't fully use, or copy-pasting Form 4s into your trading journal — this is the missing piece.

Use cases & workflows

1. Day trader / swing trader: catch insider-buying clusters before the news cycle

Watch 20–50 small-/mid-cap tickers. Set minTransactionValue: 50000. Insider clusters (3+ officers buying in one day) are one of the highest-conviction signals in equity markets — and you'll see them before the 8-K hits. Recent example: on the first day this actor was tested live, six Patrick Industries (PATK) officers bought the open market in a single session, totaling over $2.4M. That's the textbook setup.

2. Quant: build your own factor model

Set notificationChannel: "none". Schedule the actor every 30 minutes. Every match writes to the Apify dataset. Wire the dataset to your data warehouse via the Apify Webhook Integration → Snowflake/BigQuery/S3. Backtest insider-cluster strategies against price data without scraping anything yourself.

3. Long-only PM: monitor your portfolio

Watch your 30 holdings. Filter to sells over $500K. Get a Slack ping when management is dumping shares — often the first signal something has changed in the business.

4. Newsletter / fintwit creator: never miss a story

Watch the S&P 100. Pipe alerts into a private Discord. Be first on Twitter when a CEO sells $50M.

5. Compliance / IR team: monitor your own company

Watch your own ticker. Confirm that insiders are filing on time and within blackout-period rules.

6. AI agent / LLM workflow: feed insider trades into Claude/GPT

Use customWebhookUrl to POST every match to your own LLM-driven analysis pipeline. Auto-summarize cluster events, correlate with earnings, generate trade theses.

How to use SEC Form 4 Monitor

⚠️ Important: this actor must be scheduled to receive ongoing alerts. A single run only checks for filings once. Use Apify's built-in Schedules feature — no Zapier, n8n, cron server, or other third party needed. It's already part of your Apify account and free to use.

1. Click "Try for free" to add the actor to your Apify account.
2. Configure the input: tickers (e.g. NVDA, TSLA, META), minTransactionValue, and pick a notificationChannel.
3. Paste your webhook URL or Telegram credentials. All secret fields are stored encrypted by Apify.
4. First run: enable testMode to fire one alert for the most recent matching filing and confirm your webhook works.
5. Set up the Schedule (the only thing that turns this from a one-shot into a real-time monitor):
   • Open the actor → Schedules tab → Create new schedule
   • Cron: 0 */2 * * * (every 2 hours) is the recommended default
   • Choose this actor + the same input you tested with
   • Save. That's it — alerts will now arrive on your schedule.

Schedule cadence cheat sheet

Cron	Frequency	Best for
*/30 * * * *	every 30 min	Active day traders, news desks
0 */2 * * *	every 2 hours	Most retail traders, default
0 */6 * * *	every 6 hours	Long-term investors
0 13 * * 1-5	weekdays 9am ET	Daily morning digest

Why no n8n / Zapier / external scheduler is needed: Apify Schedules runs the actor on Apify's infrastructure, fully managed. Your watchlist + webhook stay in this one config. Less moving parts, less to break, less surface area for credential leaks.

Input

Field	Description
tickers	Stock tickers to watch (["NVDA","TSLA",…])
minTransactionValue	Minimum USD value of a transaction to alert on. Default 100000.
alertOnBuys	Alert on purchases (P), grants (A), option exercises (M). Default true.
alertOnSells	Alert on sales (S) and tax withholding sales (F). Default true.
notificationChannel	none | slack | discord | telegram | webhook
slackWebhookUrl	Slack incoming webhook (when channel = slack)
discordWebhookUrl	Discord webhook (when channel = discord)
telegramBotToken + telegramChatId	Telegram bot credentials
customWebhookUrl	Any HTTPS endpoint receiving JSON alerts
userAgent	Required by SEC: Your Name your@email.com
testMode	First-run sanity check — fires one alert without dedup

Output

Every alert is also pushed to the run's dataset. Example item:

{
  "accessionNumber": "000120992926000006",
  "filedAt": "2026-05-06T08:42:11-04:00",
  "ticker": "PATK",
  "company": "PATRICK INDUSTRIES INC",
  "insiderName": "NEMETH ANDY L",
  "insiderTitle": "Director, Chief Executive Officer",
  "transactionType": "Open-market purchase",
  "transactionCode": "P",
  "shares": 10000,
  "pricePerShare": 88,
  "totalValue": 880000,
  "filingUrl": "https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/76605/.../...-index.htm"
}

You can download the dataset in JSON, CSV, Excel, or HTML from the Apify Console, query it via the Apify API, or auto-pipe it to Google Sheets, Airtable, Notion, or Slack via Apify integrations.

Data table

Field	Type	Description
filedAt	date	When EDGAR received the filing
ticker	string	Stock ticker symbol
company	string	Issuer company name
insiderName	string	Reporting person
insiderTitle	string	Director / Officer / 10% Owner / officer title
transactionType	string	Open-market purchase, sale, grant, option exercise, etc.
transactionCode	string	SEC code: P (buy), S (sell), A (grant), M (exercise), F (tax withholding)
shares	number	Number of shares transacted
pricePerShare	number	USD price per share
totalValue	number	shares × price
filingUrl	link	Direct link to the SEC filing index

Pricing — pay-per-event

This actor uses Apify pay-per-event pricing: ~$0.10 per alert delivered. On days with no insider activity matching your filters, you pay nothing. Compare to:

Service	Approx cost	Notes
Bloomberg Terminal	$24,000/year	Includes everything, but you're paying for terminals you may not need
FactSet	$12,000+/year	Institutional only
WhaleWisdom Pro	$1,000+/year	Mostly 13F-focused; Form 4 is secondary
VerityData / InsiderScore	$$$ enterprise	Best-in-class but priced for hedge funds
OpenInsider	Free	No alerts, no API, dashboard only
SEC Form 4 Monitor	~$5–$25/month for typical retail use	Push alerts + JSON API

A typical retail user watching 5–10 tickers averages 5–20 alerts per month. A quant team watching the Russell 2000 might see 500+ alerts per month — still under $50.

Tips & advanced options

• Tune minTransactionValue carefully. $0 floods you with routine vesting and tax withholding. $100K is a reasonable retail default. $1M filters to executive-cluster signals only.
• Schedule frequency. Every 2 hours catches most filings within ~1 hour of EDGAR posting. Every 30 minutes is best for active traders. Every 6 hours is fine for long-term investors.
• Cluster detection. Run multiple actor instances per sector and watch for clusters — 3+ insiders in the same company buying in one week is a strong leading indicator.
• Pipe to a database. Set notificationChannel: "none" and use Apify's Webhook Integration to POST every new dataset item to your own backend.
• Combine with 13F & 13D scrapers. This actor handles Form 4. Pair it with separate actors for 13F (institutional) and 13D/G (activist) filings for a complete insider/institution picture.

FAQ

Is this legal? Yes. Form 4 filings are public information published by the SEC under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. There is no restriction on using them.

How fresh is the data? EDGAR's RSS feed updates every few minutes. Latency from filing-acceptance to your alert is roughly the gap between scheduled runs (so 2 hours on the default cadence), plus ~30 seconds for parsing.

Why am I missing some filings? EDGAR's "current" feed shows the 100 most-recent Form 4s. On extremely high-volume days (proxy seasons, post-earnings windows) older filings may scroll off before your next run. Increase schedule frequency to every 30 minutes or every hour during peak periods.

Why isn't my ticker matching? SEC tracks companies by CIK, not ticker. Recently-IPO'd companies, ADRs, and some non-US-listed entities may not yet appear in SEC's company_tickers.json mapping. Open an issue with the ticker and we'll investigate.

Does this work for 13F/13D/13G filings? No — this actor monitors Form 4 only (officer/director/10%-owner trades). Institutional 13Fs and activist 13D/Gs are separate filing types and would need their own actors.

Does this work for Schedule A grants or 10b5-1 plan trades? Yes. Form 4 captures these — they appear with transaction codes A (grant) and the 10b5-1 footnote when applicable. The actor surfaces all transaction codes; use alertOnBuys/alertOnSells and minTransactionValue to filter.

What if I want non-US insider data? This actor is US-only (SEC EDGAR). Canadian SEDI filings, UK FCA filings, and EU MAR filings would each need a separate actor.

Support & feedback

Open an issue on the actor's Issues tab on Apify Store. Feature requests welcome — especially around clustering analytics, alternative filing types, and integration patterns.

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Disclaimer: This actor is an information-retrieval tool for publicly available SEC filings. Nothing in its output constitutes investment advice. Trade responsibly.

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