How to track insider buying and selling from SEC Form 4 filings
Short answer
Officers, directors and 10% owners must file a Form 4 with the SEC within two business days of a trade. Open-market purchases carry transaction code P and sales code S; grants, option exercises and gifts use other codes, so filter to P and S. Several different insiders buying the same company within a few days (a cluster buy) is the pattern most people watch.
- List your tickers, or scan every filing for the whole market.
- Keep only codes P (purchase) and S (sale) and drop small trades (for example under $10,000).
- Group buys of the same company within 7 days to spot cluster buys.
- Open the filing link to read the footnotes (planned 10b5-1 sales are disclosed there).
- Schedule it daily with new trades only.
Copy-paste code
Insidewell on Apify: open-market trades for two tickers over 14 days (your own Apify token)
curl -s -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/cybermax~sec-insider-tracker/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"tickers": ["AAPL", "NVDA"], "lookbackDays": 14, "onlyOpenMarket": true, "flagClusterBuys": true}'Good to know
This is public filing data, not investment advice.
Insidewell: See which insiders just bought their own stock
$0.004 per trade + $0.015 per flagged cluster buyInsidewell returns parsed open-market trades with the filing link at $0.004 each and flags cluster buys; compute included.
Runs on your own Apify account, pay per result; failed results are not charged.Questions
What does a cluster buy mean?
Two or more insiders buying the same company's stock in the open market within a short window; Insidewell flags it.
Are option exercises insider buying?
Not open-market buying; they are excluded when you keep only code P.
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