SEC Form 4 Insider Trading Tracker — CEO/CFO Buys & Sells

Track every Form 4 filing the SEC publishes — CEOs, CFOs, Directors, and 10% owners buying or selling their own company's stock. Cluster-buy detection. Real shares × price × total value × post-transaction ownership. Bloomberg insider-flow alternative for hedge funds, quants, and retail smart-money followers — without the $24K/year terminal.

📊 Sample Output

When the CEO of a company buys $5M of his own stock with cash, that's a signal. Academic research consistently shows that insider buying — especially cluster buying by multiple officers simultaneously — outperforms the S&P 500 by 6–12% over the following 12 months. The data is free, public, and filed within 2 business days of every transaction. The problem is that nobody on Wall Street wants to pay $24K/year for a Bloomberg terminal just to monitor it, and the SEC's raw filing system is unusable at scale.

This actor solves that. It pulls every Form 4 filing across every US-listed company — sortable by ticker, date range, transaction type (buys vs sells), insider role (CEO / CFO / Director / 10% owner), minimum dollar value, and cluster-buy flag — and returns a clean, structured dataset ready for your trading model, dashboard, alert system, or compliance audit.

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What Form 4 Is (And Why It Matters)

Under SEC Section 16(a), every officer, director, and 10% beneficial owner of a US-listed company must file a Form 4 within 2 business days of any transaction in that company's stock. The filing is public, free, and the official source of truth for "insider trading" — the legal kind, where insiders disclose their trades, not the illegal kind.

The signal value is well-documented:

• Open-market CEO buys: highest-conviction signal. The CEO is using personal after-tax cash to buy stock they could already get cheaper via options.
• Cluster buys (3+ insiders buying in 30 days): strongest documented insider signal — Lakonishok & Lee (2001), Cohen-Malloy-Pomorski (2012) both find 6–12% annualized alpha.
• CFO sells under 10b5-1 plans: weak signal (pre-scheduled). Discretionary CFO sells outside a plan: strong negative signal.
• 10% owner activity: signals strategic positioning by large holders (Berkshire, BlackRock, activist funds).

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Output Schema

Each dataset item is one Form 4 transaction line:

Field	Type	Example
filing_date	str	2026-05-08
filing_time	str	18:48:54
transaction_date	str	2026-05-08
filer_name	str	Martell Frank
filer_title	str	CEO
relationship	str	Officer / Director / 10% Owner / Other
company_ticker	str	SMRT
company_name	str	Smartrent, Inc.
transaction_code	str	P (Purchase) / S (Sale) / A (Award) / G (Gift) / F (Tax) / M (Option Exercise)
transaction_type	str	Open Market Purchase
shares_transacted	int	50000 (signed: + buy, − sell)
shares_transacted_abs	int	50000
price_per_share	float	1.12
total_value_usd	int	56220
total_value_usd_abs	int	56220
shares_owned_after	int	3065266
pct_change_owned_pct	float	2.0
form_4_url	str	https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/...
is_cluster_buy	bool	true if 3+ insiders bought this ticker in 30 days
is_cluster_sell	bool	true if 3+ insiders sold this ticker in 30 days
data_source	str	openinsider.com + sec.gov

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Input Filters

Filter	Type	Description
limit	int (1–5000)	Max records to return. Default 100.
transaction_type	enum	buys / sells / all. Default buys (highest signal).
date_range	enum	last_7d / last_30d / last_90d / last_180d / all. Default last_30d.
min_value_usd	int	Minimum transaction dollar value. 0 = no filter.
ticker	str	Single ticker symbol to filter (e.g. AAPL). Blank = all.
insider_role	enum	all / ceo / cfo / officer / director / 10%_owner.
cluster_only	bool	If true, return only cluster trades (3+ insiders same direction in 30 days).

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Use Cases

1. Hedge Funds & Quant Shops

Build a quant signal: long companies with 3+ open-market officer buys in the last 30 days, short companies with 3+ officer sells outside 10b5-1 plans. Backtest against the last 5 years using the last_180d window iterated through historical date ranges.

2. Retail "Smart Money" Followers

Screen for high-conviction CEO/CFO buys above $1M. These are personal-cash trades — the CEO can't claim "tax-loss harvesting" or "diversification" when they're concentrating more into their own company.

3. Compliance & Risk Teams

Monitor insider activity at your top suppliers, customers, and competitors. Sudden CFO sells before a quarterly earnings release? Get notified before the market.

4. M&A Bankers

Track 10% owner activity at potential takeover targets. Activist accumulation patterns often precede public 13D filings by weeks.

5. Journalists & Researchers

Audit-grade SEC links on every record. Drop the CSV into a story without worrying about source attribution.

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Comparison vs Bloomberg / FactSet / Refinitiv / TipRanks / OpenInsider Pro

Capability	This Actor	Bloomberg	FactSet	Refinitiv	TipRanks	OpenInsider Pro
Form 4 transaction-level data	✅	✅	✅	✅	⚠ summary	✅
CEO/CFO/Director role filter	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌	⚠ manual
Cluster-buy detection	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌	✅
Min-value filter	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅
Post-transaction ownership	✅	✅	✅	✅	⚠ partial	✅
Direct SEC EDGAR link	✅	⚠ separate	⚠ separate	⚠ separate	❌	✅
API / programmatic access	✅	✅ ($24K/yr)	✅ ($30K/yr)	✅ ($22K/yr)	⚠ paid	❌ scrape only
Pay-per-result pricing	✅ $0.10	❌ flat	❌ flat	❌ flat	❌ flat	❌ subscription
Annual cost @ 10K records/yr	$1,001	$24,000+	$30,000+	$22,000+	$2,400	$948

Bottom line: if you don't need a full Bloomberg terminal (and 99% of teams don't), this actor gets you the same insider-flow data for 3–4% of the cost.

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Example Output

{
  "filing_date": "2026-05-08",
  "filing_time": "18:48:54",
  "transaction_date": "2026-05-08",
  "filer_name": "Martell Frank",
  "filer_title": "CEO",
  "relationship": "Officer",
  "company_ticker": "SMRT",
  "company_name": "Smartrent, Inc.",
  "transaction_code": "P",
  "transaction_type": "Open Market Purchase",
  "shares_transacted": 50000,
  "shares_transacted_abs": 50000,
  "price_per_share": 1.12,
  "total_value_usd": 56220,
  "total_value_usd_abs": 56220,
  "shares_owned_after": 3065266,
  "pct_change_owned_pct": 2.0,
  "form_4_url": "https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1837014/000119312526215194/xslF345X03/ownership.xml",
  "is_cluster_buy": false,
  "is_cluster_sell": false,
  "data_source": "openinsider.com (Form 4 aggregator) + sec.gov (audit link)"
}

---

Quickstart

Apify Console

1. Click Start on the actor page.
2. Set transaction_type to buys, date_range to last_30d, min_value_usd to 100000.
3. Hit Run. Results appear in the dataset within ~30 seconds.

cURL

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/nexgendata~sec-form4-insider-tracker/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"limit": 100, "transaction_type": "buys", "date_range": "last_30d", "min_value_usd": 250000}'

Python SDK

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("nexgendata/sec-form4-insider-tracker").call(run_input={
    "limit": 500,
    "transaction_type": "buys",
    "date_range": "last_90d",
    "insider_role": "ceo",
    "min_value_usd": 1000000,
    "cluster_only": True,
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(f"{item['filing_date']} {item['company_ticker']} {item['filer_name']} "
          f"({item['filer_title']}) bought ${item['total_value_usd_abs']:,}")

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Pricing

$0.10 per Form 4 transaction record returned, plus $0.01 per actor start.

• Smoke test (10 records): $1.01
• Daily monitor (100 records/day): $3.01/day, ~$90/month
• Full universe pull (5,000 records): $500.01

Compare to: Bloomberg ($2,000+/month), FactSet ($2,500+/month), Refinitiv ($1,800+/month). Even TipRanks Premium ($199/month) doesn't expose transaction-level Form 4 data via API.

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How It Works

Primary data source: OpenInsider — a clean HTML aggregator that mirrors every SEC Form 4 filing within seconds of publication. We chose OpenInsider over the raw SEC EDGAR full-text search because:

1. Pre-parsed cluster flags — OpenInsider's X column already tags cluster activity.
2. Transaction-pricing context — OpenInsider parses the price and quantity fields out of the SEC XML reliably; SEC EDGAR returns the raw XML which is hostile to parse.
3. Per-row SEC link — every OpenInsider row links directly to the SEC EDGAR Form 4 XML for the audit trail.
4. Doesn't rate-limit under reasonable use.

Audit trail: Every record includes form_4_url pointing to the official SEC EDGAR XML filing. You can verify any transaction independently in 1 click.

Cluster detection: Computed locally on the returned dataset — we count distinct insiders per (ticker, direction) over the last 30 days and tag any company with 3+ insiders trading the same way.

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FAQ

Q: How fresh is the data? A: OpenInsider re-scans SEC EDGAR every ~15 minutes. The SEC's own 2-business-day filing window is the binding constraint — even Bloomberg can't show you a Form 4 before the insider files it.

Q: Does this include Form 144 (planned sales)? A: No — Form 144 is filed before a planned sale, and is a different filing. This actor tracks Form 4 (the actual transaction record). Form 144 is much noisier and has lower signal value.

Q: How are 10b5-1 plan sales handled? A: The SEC requires insiders to flag 10b5-1 sales on the filing. We do not currently expose that flag explicitly, but you can identify likely 10b5-1 sales by clicking through to the form_4_url — they're typically routine, evenly-sized, and recur monthly.

Q: What about international (non-US-listed) insiders? A: Form 4 is a US-only filing. For non-US insider disclosures, see local equivalents (UK FSA "PDMR" notices, Japanese "TOSHO" filings).

Q: Can I get historical data going back 10 years? A: The all date range pulls the full OpenInsider screener window (~2 years). For deeper history, query the actor in a loop with rolling date windows — each Form 4 filing has its SEC URL preserved.

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Related Actors — Build A Full SEC / Smart-Money Stack

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SEC Schedule 13D/G Activist Tracker	5%+ ownership stakes by activists (Icahn, Ackman, Loeb).
SEC Form 8-K Material Events Scraper	Real-time material disclosures — M&A, CEO changes, restatements.
Finviz Stock Screener	Filter the full US-listed universe by 60+ technical & fundamental criteria.
Chinese ADRs Stock Screener	Track Chinese companies listed on US exchanges with risk and delisting flags.
Finance MCP Server	LLM-ready finance data — give Claude / GPT access to insider flows, fundamentals, charts.

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Disclaimer

This actor returns public SEC Form 4 filing data sourced from SEC EDGAR (via OpenInsider as an aggregator). All transaction details are filed by the insiders themselves under SEC regulation; we add no proprietary signal, ranking, or recommendation. This is not investment advice. Insider trading data is one input among many; past performance does not predict future results.

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Affiliate / Referral

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🔗 Related NexGenData Actors

Part of the NexGenData SEC Filing suite — pair this Actor with:

• SEC Form 8-K Material Events Tracker
• SEC Form 13F Holdings Tracker Hedge Fund Filings
• SEC Form D Tracker Private Capital Raises & Exempt Offerings
• SEC Form ADV Investment Adviser Registration Tracker