🚨 SEC Schedule 13D/G Activist Tracker — Takeover & Position Signals

Catch activist positions and 5%+ accumulation events the day they're disclosed. Direct from SEC EDGAR. No API key, no scraping the front-end, no paywall.

When an investor crosses 5% beneficial ownership of a US public company's class of equity, they MUST file a Schedule 13. Schedule 13D = activist (Item 4 narrative discloses intent: control, board seats, push for sale). Schedule 13G = passive holder (no intent to influence). Both are a rich signal for event-driven traders, M&A bankers, takeover targets, and activist-investor research desks.

This Actor pulls every 13D / 13D/A / 13G / 13G/A in a date window, parses the cover page + Item 4 narrative, and ships clean rows ready for your trading system, vector DB, or competitive-intel dashboard.

What you get (per filing)

• form_type — SC 13D, SC 13D/A, SC 13G, or SC 13G/A
• is_activist — boolean (13D family only)
• is_amendment — boolean (/A suffix)
• filing_date, accession_number
• filer_name — the entity / fund acquiring the position
• subject_name + subject_ticker — the target company
• cusip, percent_of_class — extracted from the cover page
• purpose_item_4 — the activist intent narrative (13D only; up to 2,000 chars)
• primary_doc_url, filing_index_url — direct links to SEC.gov
• display_names, filer_ciks, biz_locations, source

Six high-leverage use cases

1. Activist alert — every Item 4 narrative containing "board representation", "strategic alternatives", or "value creation" hits your Slack the day it files.
2. M&A pre-game — accumulating positions over consecutive amendments often precede a takeover bid. Differential reads of percent_of_class across /A filings are the signal.
3. 5%+ holder lookup — given a subject_ticker, list every 13D/G filer that's crossed 5% in the past N days.
4. Activist-by-activist tracking — search the filer_name for Pershing Square, Elliott, ValueAct, Engaged, Starboard, Trian, Carl Icahn, Bill Ackman, Nelson Peltz.
5. Compliance intake — corporate-secretary teams need to know who just crossed 5% of their company's stock before the SEC alerts hit news wires.
6. Backtest activist alpha — pair this feed with daily price returns to compute the empirical activist premium over arbitrary time windows.

JSON quick start

{
  "dateFrom": "2024-12-01",
  "dateTo": "2024-12-15",
  "formTypes": ["SC 13D", "SC 13D/A"],
  "maxFilings": 25
}

POST to https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/nexgendata~sec-schedule-13dg-activist-tracker/runs?token=YOUR_TOKEN.

Python SDK example

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("nexgendata/sec-schedule-13dg-activist-tracker").call(
    run_input={
        "dateFrom": "2024-12-01",
        "dateTo": "2024-12-15",
        "formTypes": ["SC 13D", "SC 13D/A"],
        "maxFilings": 25,
    }
)
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    if item["is_activist"]:
        print(item["filing_date"], item["filer_name"], "→",
              item["subject_name"], item.get("percent_of_class"), "%")

cURL one-liner

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/nexgendata~sec-schedule-13dg-activist-tracker/runs?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"dateFrom":"2024-12-01","dateTo":"2024-12-15","formTypes":["SC 13D"],"maxFilings":25}'

Pipe the output anywhere

• Zapier — Apify → New Items in Dataset → Slack channel / Airtable / Google Sheets
• Make.com — daily watcher → email digest of new activist positions
• n8n — Apify trigger → Postgres warehouse → Metabase dashboard
• Langchain / vector DB — embed purpose_item_4 text for similarity search across all activist filings

Pricing — pay only for what you get

Event	Cost
Actor start	$0.00005 (one-time per run, scaled by GB-RAM)
Each 13D/G filing	$0.10

A weekly pull of every 13D filed (~30/week) costs about $3. A full year of 13D-only history is ~$160. Compare to a Bloomberg terminal ($24K/yr), Tegus ($18K/yr), or even the dedicated activism trackers like 13D Monitor ($5K+/yr).

Cost calculator: filings × $0.10 + $0.00005 × memoryGB. No subscription, no minimum.

FAQ

Q. What's the difference between 13D and 13G? A. Schedule 13D: filer has intent to influence control (activist). Filed within 5 business days. Item 4 narrative is required. Schedule 13G: filer is a passive holder (typically institutions like Vanguard / BlackRock for index funds). Annual or shorter cadence.

Q. Why is percent_of_class sometimes null? A. The Schedule 13 cover page is a printed form that's filed in many formats — DOCX-printed PDFs, scanned images, custom HTML. Our parser captures the canonical case (>90% of filings); for the rest, the primary_doc_url link is your source of truth.

Q. Can I get historical filings? A. Yes — Schedule 13 has been filed since the Williams Act (1968). EDGAR full-text search returns hits going back to ~1994.

Q. What about Schedule 13F? A. Different form. 13F is the institutional-holdings quarterly report ($100M+ AUM). Use our SEC Form 13F Holdings Tracker.

Q. Is the data free / public? A. Yes — the source is SEC.gov. We charge for the engineered pipeline that takes you from raw EDGAR full-text search → structured dataset rows.

Related actors from the same author

• SEC Form 13F Holdings Tracker — quarterly 13F-HR holdings, $0.10/holding.
• SEC Form 4 Insider Trading Scraper — officer/director trades + derivative legs.
• SEC Form 8-K Material Events Scraper — M&A, exec changes, bankruptcy, cyber events.

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Built and maintained by the nexgendata team. Bug reports & feature requests welcome via Apify Console messaging.