UK CMA Market Study & Investigation Watch

CMA market studies and market investigations as they open and progress.

Source

gov.uk Search API, CMA case records (public, logged-out)

• https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json?filter_format=cma_case

Public, logged-out only — no API key, login, cookie or CAPTCHA.

The eight delta types

value	case family
merger-inquiry-open	a merger inquiry appears or opens
merger-outcome	a merger case gains an outcome or closes
consumer-enforcement	consumer-enforcement case movement
cartel-investigation	Competition Act, civil/criminal cartel and director-disqualification cases
digital-markets-status	Digital Markets Unit case movement
subsidy-referral	Subsidy Advice Unit referral movement
market-study	market study and market investigation movement
remedy-review	review of existing orders and undertakings

Leave delta_types empty for all eight. Every delta carries delta_kinds.

How this actor talks about investigations

An open Competition Act or cartel case is an investigation, not a finding. This actor is built so it cannot say otherwise:

• finding_status is read from an explicit map of every outcome value the CMA corpus contains. An unrecognised outcome reports no-finding-recorded-unmapped-outcome — it is never pattern-matched into a status.
• states_adverse_finding is true for exactly four published outcomes: Chapter I infringement, Chapter II infringement, a disqualification order granted, and a consumer-law court order.
• No party names are extracted from investigation or enforcement cases. Merger titles are structured, so merger parties are listed; a cartel case carries its title verbatim and an empty parties list.
• A criminal-cartel verdict is reported as a verdict. The source does not say which way it went, so neither does this actor.
• Commitments, undertakings, no-grounds-for-action and administrative-priorities closures all report explicitly as not findings.
• Investigation cases without a published adverse finding carry a language_note saying so.

Pricing

Event	Price (FREE tier)
Actor start (apify-actor-start)	$0.02 one-time
Source check (source-check)	$0.10
Per delta (cma-case-delta)	$0.75

source-check ladder, GOLD-floored: $0.10 / $0.09 / $0.08 / $0.067. Charged once per run after the source enumeration terminates — seed and genuine-zero runs included. Not charged when the source refused the read.

The per-delta value event (cma-case-delta) is the primary event and is priced at $0.75 per delta at the FREE tier. Ladder, GOLD-floored: $0.75 / $0.675 / $0.60 / $0.5025 (FREE / BRONZE / SILVER / GOLD-PLATINUM-DIAMOND). source-check still charges; it is no longer the headline event. Billed deltas are capped at 500 per run and any overflow is reported as a withholding rather than charged.

Snapshot mode is a PREVIEW

watch_mode: false returns at most 25 records, hard-capped in code.

Watch semantics

First watch run seeds and emits zero deltas. Billed deltas capped at 500 per run. A truncated read suppresses REMOVED rather than reporting a case as withdrawn.

Terminal states

NORMAL · SUCCEEDED-0: GENUINE_EMPTY · SUCCEEDED-0 (no change) · PARTIAL · BLOCKED.

What this Actor covers, and what moved into it

Three CMA case families, watched as one low-frequency structural feed:

case family	cases in the corpus	measured movement
markets — market studies and investigations	71	0.08 opened/wk, 0.54 page-touches/wk
review-of-orders-and-undertakings — remedy reviews	31	1 closure in 365 days
digital-markets-unit — DMU / digital markets status	4 in existence	1 opened in 365 days

The last two shipped briefly as separate Actors and were folded in on 2026-07-27. The reason is in the table: a standing watch on four cases bills you every week to tell you nothing almost every week. Folded, you get the same coverage on one check.

Counted by walking the whole corpus — 2,570 of 2,570 cases — not sampled.

Run it WEEKLY, not daily

Schedule this Actor once a week. That is about your bill, not your coverage — a weekly run reads the same corpus and misses nothing.

The CMA docket is slow. Walking all 2,570 cases on 2026-07-27, every one of the six CMA watches measured under one delta per week, and most well under. A daily schedule pays seven source-check events a week for a source that moves two or three times a week across the whole docket — the check would be 70–80% of your bill and buy no extra signal.

This is a low-frequency, high-consequence feed. A merger prohibition or a Chapter I infringement finding moves share prices; it just does not happen on a Tuesday because you checked. Override the cadence if you have a reason to.

One delta type per Actor

This Actor watches market-study and nothing else. The other delta types in this family are separate Actors, each with its own price and its own baseline — so you pay for the feed you want and no other.