SEC Form 4 Insider Trading Signals

When an executive or director buys shares in their own company, US law makes them file it publicly within two business days. This Actor reads every one of those filings and returns the trades that carry a signal.

About 80% of Form 4 activity is automatic compensation — option exercises, share grants, tax withholding. Most scrapers hand you all of it. This one separates the paperwork from the decisions, so you get the trades where an insider chose to spend their own money.

---

What you get

Real purchases only	Open-market buys, separated from grants, exercises and tax events. Every row is money that actually changed hands at a real price.
Conviction score, 0–100	A single ranked number for how informative each purchase looks, so the strongest activity is at the top and you never read 200 rows to find the one that matters.
Cluster buys	Flags when several different insiders at the same company buy within the same short window — far harder to explain away than one person acting alone. Clustered rows name the other buyers and what they spent.
Pre-scheduled trades flagged	Purchases locked in months earlier under a Rule 10b5-1 plan are marked, and can be filtered out in one click.
One row per trade	Co-filed, jointly held and footnote-split filings are collapsed to the single economic event they represent. You are never billed twice for one purchase.
Mis-keyed filings flagged	Form 4 is self-reported and people fat-finger it. Implausible figures keep their source link but are marked and pushed down the ranking.
A link straight back to EDGAR	Every row links to the original filing, so nothing here has to be taken on trust.

---

How to use it

Option 1 — Pull the data once

1. Click Try for free, then Start.
2. Wait about two minutes.
3. Export as JSON, CSV or Excel.

Defaults sweep the whole US market for recent filings and return open-market buys over $25,000 — around 90–100 rows.

Option 2 — Get it emailed to you daily

1. Tick Email me a daily digest and enter your address.
2. Save as a Task, then add a Schedule for 30 2 * * 2-6.

That's it — the digest switch configures everything else, including the history needed for cluster detection. The cron above is 02:30 UTC, Tuesday to Saturday: 10:30 PM US Eastern, once EDGAR has finished publishing the trading day that just closed. Each trading day reaches you exactly once, and you are only charged for the day you receive — the extra history is read for context and discarded.

---

Settings worth knowing

Setting	What it does
Tickers / CIKs	Leave empty to sweep the whole market. Fill in to watch a short list — much cheaper.
Exclude pre-scheduled 10b5-1 trades	Drops purchases locked in months in advance. The most effective single filter.
Minimum transaction value	Lower it for small caps, where a meaningful buy is smaller in dollars.
Cluster minimum insiders	Raise it for a much shorter, much stronger list.
Signal types	Defaults to purchases. Add sales or other transaction types if you want the full picture.
Start date / End date	Set both for historical backfills. EDGAR's daily indexes go back years.

---

What a row looks like

{
  "convictionScore": 82,
  "ticker": "DKS",
  "issuerName": "DICK'S SPORTING GOODS, INC.",
  "insiderName": "Barrenechea Mark J",
  "insiderRole": "Director",
  "signalType": "open_market_buy",
  "transactionDate": "2026-08-27",
  "shares": 17000,
  "pricePerShare": 130.72,
  "transactionValueUsd": 2222240,
  "holdingsIncreasePct": 189.37,
  "isPlanned10b5_1": false,
  "clusterIndividualCount": 4,
  "clusterTotalValueUsd": 3722302.6,
  "filingIndexUrl": "https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/..."
}

A director spending $2.2M of his own money, nearly tripling his personal stake, with three other insiders at the same company buying the same week. That is what this exists to find. (A real row from a live run.)

Rows also carry the SEC transaction code, the insider's exact title, co-filers, shares held afterwards, security type, the other buyers in any cluster, and quality flags. The full field list is on the Storage tab of any run.

---

What it costs

Actor start	$0.01
Each transaction returned	$0.01

A default market sweep runs about $0.90–1.00. A daily emailed digest is roughly $0.60 per report. Watching a handful of tickers costs a few cents.

You can cap the maximum charge on any run. Results are ranked before the cut, so a smaller budget still keeps the most significant activity.

---

Questions

Are these real purchases, or share awards? Real purchases. Grants, option exercises and tax withholding are identified and excluded by default — they carry a different SEC transaction code and usually no price at all. Every row returned has a genuine price per share.

Where does the data come from? Straight from SEC EDGAR — the daily index and the ownership document inside each filing. Nothing is cached or resold, and the Actor respects the SEC's fair-access rate limits.

Is this legal? Yes. These are US federal government records published for public use. Section 16(a) of the Securities Exchange Act requires insiders to disclose these trades.

Is the conviction score investment advice? No. It is a screening heuristic for ranking, computed only from figures the insider disclosed themselves. It is not a prediction, it is not a recommendation, and it has not been tested against future returns. Every row links to the original filing so you can judge it yourself. Do your own research and talk to a licensed professional.

Why so many fewer rows than filings scanned? By design. Most Form 4 rows are compensation mechanics, and the defaults return only open-market purchases above $25,000.

---

Support

Found a bug, a filing that parses badly, or need a field that isn't here? Open an issue on the Issues tab.