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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.

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.

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).

Output Schema

Each dataset item is one Form 4 transaction line:

Input Filters

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.

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

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.

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']:,}")

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.

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.

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.

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

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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