SEC Form 4 Insider Trades — Real-Time Parser

Pull every insider buy, sell, and option exercise for any public company. Real-time. Structured. Sub-second latency from the moment EDGAR receives the filing.

This actor parses SEC Form 4 filings — the legally-mandated disclosure that every director, officer, and 10%+ shareholder must file within 2 business days of any transaction in their company's stock. The output is the cleanest, most actionable insider trading data you can get without paying $99-499/month for a commercial tool.

What you actually get (verified on real data)

Real transactions returned in test runs:

Company	Insider	Title	Date	Code	Shares	Price	Value
Tesla	Zhu Xiaotong	SVP	2026-03-31	M (option exercise)	20,000	$20.57	$411,400
Meta	Javier Olivan	COO	2026-03-23	S (sell)	1,334	$605.38	$807,576
Meta	Javier Olivan	COO	2026-03-16	S (sell)	1,334	$632.02	$843,114
Meta	Robert M Kimmitt	Director	2026-03-16	S (sell)	580	$632.02	$366,572
Apple	Deirdre O'Brien	SVP	2026-04-01	M (option exercise)	64,317	option strike	option exercise
Apple	Deirdre O'Brien	SVP	2026-04-02	S (sell)	30,002	market price	open-market sale
Apple	Sabih Khan	COO	2026-04-01	M (option exercise)	64,317	option strike	option exercise

Each row includes:

• Insider identity: full name, CIK, title, role flags (director / officer / 10%+ owner)
• Transaction details: date, code, type, shares, price per share, total value
• Codes correctly classified: M (option exercise), S (open-market sale), P (open-market purchase), A (grant), F (sell-to-cover taxes), G (gift), and 14+ more
• Post-transaction holdings: shares owned after the transaction
• Direct vs Indirect ownership (D = direct, I = held in trust/family/etc.)
• Both common stock AND derivative securities (options, RSUs, warrants)
• Direct link to the filing on SEC EDGAR

Why use this

Insider trading is one of the most-cited alpha factors in quantitative finance. Studies show insiders consistently earn excess returns from open-market purchases (code P), and clusters of insider sells (code S) often precede stock declines. The trick is getting the data fast enough to act on it — Form 4 filings have a 2-business-day deadline, and signal value decays within hours.

Buyers for this kind of data:

• Hedge funds and quant traders — track insider activity as an alpha factor; signals from open-market buys (code P) are statistically significant
• Retail traders — follow CEO/insider transactions (popular trading strategy)
• Financial journalists — break stories on suspicious-looking insider sales (especially before earnings)
• Activist investors — track insider ownership changes
• Compliance + risk teams — monitor insider transactions for material non-public information violations
• Investor relations teams — report insider activity to internal stakeholders

Commercial alternatives:

• InsiderScore (Verus Analytics): $99-499/month
• SecForm4.com: paid subscription
• OpenInsider: free but batch-updated nightly (signal too late for trading)
• InsiderArbitrage: $50-200/month
• Bloomberg Terminal: $25k/year (insider data is one of many features)
• FactSet: $12k/year

This actor delivers the same data structure as InsiderScore at sub-second latency because it pulls directly from SEC EDGAR within minutes of filing time.

Honest limitations

• 2-business-day disclosure delay is on SEC's side, not ours. Insiders have 2 business days from the trade date to file. We pull within seconds of the filing being accepted. So end-to-end latency from the trade to your dataset is 2 business days plus a few seconds.
• No price normalization. Option exercise prices (code M) are the strike price, not market price — your downstream pipeline should handle this.
• No XBRL signature parsing. We extract the structured ownership XML, not the legal signature block. If you need the signing officer name, parse the XML yourself.
• One Form 4 filing can have multiple transactions. We return one row per transaction — so a single filing with 8 transactions becomes 8 rows. Group by accessionNumber if you want one row per filing.
• We do not currently track Form 3 (initial statement) or Form 5 (annual) filings. Only Form 4. Both are far less commonly filed.

How to use

1. Click Try for free (or Start)
2. Add stock tickers in tickers (e.g. ["TSLA", "AAPL", "META", "NVDA"])
3. Set sinceDate (e.g. "2026-01-01") — defaults to last 30 days
4. Optionally set transactionTypeFilter to focus on buy, sell, option-exercise, grant, or gift
5. Optionally set minTransactionValue to skip small trades
6. Click Start

Common transaction codes (you'll see these in transactionCode)

Code	Meaning	Why it matters
P	Open-market or private purchase	Strong bullish signal — insider used own cash to buy
S	Open-market or private sale	Bearish signal — insider used own holdings to sell
M	Exercise/conversion of derivative	Often followed by a sale; common for vested options
F	Pay exercise price/tax via securities	"Sell to cover" — neutral signal
A	Grant, award, or other acquisition	Standard comp; not a market signal
G	Bona fide gift	Often estate planning; not a market signal
D	Disposition to issuer	Buyback-related
C	Conversion of derivative security	Similar to M
X	Exercise of in-the-money derivative	Often followed by sale

For alpha signal extraction, focus on code P (insider buys) and clusters of code S (insider sells). Code M and F are noise (just employee comp mechanics).

Output

{
    "ticker": "META",
    "issuerCik": "0001326801",
    "issuerName": "Meta Platforms, Inc.",
    "accessionNumber": "0001127602-26-014321",
    "filingDate": "2026-03-23",
    "transactionDate": "2026-03-23",
    "insiderName": "Olivan Javier",
    "insiderCik": "0001815830",
    "insiderTitle": "Chief Operating Officer",
    "isDirector": false,
    "isOfficer": true,
    "isTenPercentOwner": false,
    "isOther": false,
    "securityTitle": "Class A Common Stock",
    "transactionCode": "S",
    "transactionCodeDescription": "Open-market or private sale",
    "transactionType": "sell",
    "shares": 1334,
    "pricePerShare": 605.38,
    "transactionValueUsd": 807577.49,
    "acquiredOrDisposed": "D",
    "sharesAfter": 89234,
    "ownership": "D",
    "isDerivative": false,
    "filingUrl": "https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?...&accession_number=0001127602-26-014321",
    "extractedAt": "2026-04-15T22:00:00.000Z"
}

Pricing

This actor uses pay-per-event pricing — perfect for both individual traders and quant teams:

• Actor start: $0.05 per run
• Per transaction extracted: $0.02 per transaction pushed to the dataset

Example costs:

• Track 5 mega-cap tech stocks daily (≈10 transactions/day) → ~$6/month
• Full historical pull of 100 Tesla Form 4s → ~$2-5
• Hourly check on the entire S&P 500 during earnings season → ~$50/month
• Daily snapshot of every code-P (insider buy) across all S&P 500 → ~$30/month

For comparison: InsiderScore is $99-499/month. SecForm4 paid tiers start around $50/month. OpenInsider is free but batch-only (no real-time API).

Free Apify tier members get $5/month in platform credits, which covers ~250 transactions per month.

Tips for alpha extraction

• Schedule hourly runs during market hours to catch insider buys (code P) within minutes of filing — these tend to predict stock moves over the next 30-90 days
• Filter by transactionType: buy — insider purchases (code P) are the strongest bullish signal in finance literature; insider sales (code S) are noisier because they can be motivated by tax/diversification reasons
• Cluster filter: group transactions by insiderName and date — multiple insiders buying within the same week is a much stronger signal than a single insider
• Combine with the SEC EDGAR Filing Monitor to triangulate: insider sells right before a 10-Q earnings filing are red flags
• Combine with the NIH Grants Tracker for biotech: track insider buys at small-cap biotechs that just received NIH grants
• Pipe into a quant model as an alpha factor — the literature on insider trading as alpha is robust and well-studied

API source

This actor uses the official SEC EDGAR REST API for filing discovery (https://data.sec.gov/submissions/CIK{cik}.json) and the SEC Archives for raw Form 4 XML (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/{cik}/{accession}/...xml). Both are free, public, require no authentication, and are maintained by the SEC itself.

SEC requires a User-Agent header identifying the requester (we use MCPHubResearch contact@mcphub.dev), and limits to 10 requests per second per IP. We comply automatically.

License

This actor is MIT licensed. SEC filing data is in the public domain (works of the US federal government are not subject to copyright). You may use the extracted insider transaction data for any purpose, including commercial trading, with no restrictions.

Disclaimer

This actor is for research and information purposes only. Trading on insider transaction data does not constitute insider trading under US securities law (Form 4 data is public by design), but you should consult a licensed financial advisor before making any trading decisions. The author is not responsible for any losses incurred from using this data.