SEC Form 4 is the cleanest legal window into what corporate insiders are actually doing with their own shares. Every time a director, officer, or 10%+ owner buys or sells, they must file a Form 4 within two business days. The hard part isn’t finding the filings — it’s getting them out of EDGAR’s HTML and into a spreadsheet you can actually work with.
Stop scraping EDGAR one filing at a time
SEC Filing Monitor delivers Form 4, 8-K, 13D/G, 13F & NT as one clean, event-labeled CSV+JSON feed on a schedule — no scraper to maintain.
The free way: SEC EDGAR full-text search
EDGAR’s full-text search (efts.sec.gov) and the company filing pages are public and free. You can filter by form type “4”, browse by company, and open each filing. For a one-off lookup that’s fine. The transaction details — buy vs. sell, share count, price — live inside the filing’s XML, so to get structured data you parse the ownershipDocument for each filing.
What a Form 4 actually contains
Each filing gives you the insider’s name and relationship, the issuer and ticker, the transaction date, a transaction code (P = open-market purchase, S = sale, A = grant/award, M = option exercise, G = gift), the number of shares, the price, and shares held after. The transaction code is what turns a raw filing into a labeled event — an open-market purchase by a CEO reads very differently from an automatic sale under a 10b5-1 plan.
Why CSV export gets painful at scale
EDGAR has no “export all Form 4s to CSV” button. Pull more than a handful and you run into the same wall every time: per-filing XML parsing, SEC fair-access rate limits (you need an identified User-Agent and throttling), de-duplicating amendments, and normalizing dozens of slightly different filing layouts into one clean schema. By the time you’ve built and maintained that pipeline, you’ve built a small data product.
The shortcut: a pre-labeled feed
If you just want the data, a maintained feed does the parsing for you: each row already carries the transaction type, the ticker resolved from the CIK, and a link straight back to the sec.gov filing, in both CSV and JSON. That’s exactly what the insider-cluster view in our Whale Tracker and the broader SEC Filings Toolkit are built on.
Skip the plumbing — get a clean, labeled feed
SEC Filing Monitor turns EDGAR into one event-labeled feed — Form 4, 8-K, Schedule 13D/G, 13F quarterly context and Form NT — delivered as CSV + JSON on a schedule, with every row carrying a event_label and a link back to its sec.gov source. See plans & pricing, or download a free sample (real Form 4, 8-K and 13D/G rows plus daily digests).
Factual public SEC EDGAR data only. Not real-time, not individualized, not a trading signal, and not financial, legal, or investment advice. Filing monitoring of public data. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. SEC.
Related guides
- Monitor SEC 8-K filings for material events
- Track Schedule 13D & 13G activist & 5% stakes
- SEC Filing Monitor — all five datasets in one feed
Don’t want to run the API yourself?
The SEC Filing Monitor
delivers this as a maintained, ready-to-use dataset — refreshed every morning, no code required.
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