SEC Insider Trading (Form 4) — Official Source

Real insider transactions, parsed from the SEC filings themselves. Not a list of filings — the actual trades: who bought or sold, their role in the company, the date, how many shares, at what price, and what they hold afterwards.

Why this is different

Most SEC tools hand you a list of filings and leave you to open each one. This Actor opens the Form 4 documents and extracts the transactions inside them, one row per trade.

• Official SEC sources only. data.sec.gov for the filing list, www.sec.gov/Archives for the original Form 4 XML. No scraping of third-party sites.
• No API key. SEC publishes this openly.
• Public domain. U.S. government works.
• Transaction codes explained. S becomes "Open market or private sale", so you do not have to keep the SEC code table open.
• Value computed. shares x pricePerShare, when both are present.

What is a Form 4

Officers, directors and 10%+ owners must report their trades in the company's stock, usually within two business days. Form 4 is that report.

Required: your contact

SEC's fair access policy requires automated requests to identify the requester. Put your name and email in the Your contact input, for example Jane Doe jane@example.com. It is sent in the User-Agent header, as SEC asks.

Output

Field	Description
issuerName, ticker, issuerCik	The company
insiderName, insiderCik	The person or entity filing
officerTitle	e.g. "SVP, General Counsel"
isOfficer, isDirector, isTenPercentOwner, isOther	Their relationship to the company
transactionDate, periodOfReport	When the trade happened, and the report period
transactionCode, transactionCodeMeaning	e.g. S / "Open market or private sale"
acquiredOrDisposed	"Acquired" or "Disposed"
securityType, securityTitle	Non-derivative or derivative, and the instrument
shares, pricePerShare, transactionValue	Size and price, with the product computed
sharesOwnedAfter	Holding after the trade
directOrIndirect	Direct or indirect ownership
filingDate, accessionNumber	Filing metadata
sourceUrl, filingIndexUrl	Links to the original document and its index

Examples

Recent Apple insider activity:

{
  "ticker": "AAPL",
  "max_filings": 25,
  "max_results": 100
}

Only open-market buys and sells (skip grants, option exercises and tax withholding):

{
  "ticker": "NVDA",
  "transaction_codes": ["P", "S"],
  "max_filings": 50
}

Transaction codes worth knowing

Code	Meaning	Why it matters
P	Open market purchase	An insider spending their own money
S	Open market sale	Often scheduled, not always a signal
A	Grant or award	Compensation, not a market decision
M	Option exercise	Converting options to shares
F	Shares withheld for tax	Mechanical, follows a grant or exercise
G	Gift	Transfer, not a trade

Filtering to P and S removes most of the compensation noise.

Use cases

• Tracking whether insiders are buying or selling ahead of company events
• Building a dataset of insider activity across a watchlist
• Compliance and surveillance workflows
• Research on insider transaction patterns

Limits worth knowing

• Each filing is fetched and parsed, so max_filings drives the run time. SEC's fair access limit is respected (about 8 requests per second).
• Filings that cannot be parsed are skipped rather than failing the run.
• Some transactions legitimately have no price (option exercises, gifts). Those rows keep the share count and leave pricePerShare and transactionValue empty rather than guessing.

Running locally

pip install -r requirements.txt
SEC_USER_AGENT="Your Name you@example.com" python -m tests.test_insider

Attribution

Data from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (EDGAR). This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by the SEC. Filings are submitted by registrants; the SEC does not verify their accuracy. Nothing here is investment advice.