Name: Form4API
Availability: InStock
Author: Form4API

Question 1

What is a Form 4 filing?

Accepted Answer

A Form 4 is a regulatory filing required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under Section 16(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Corporate insiders — officers, directors, and beneficial owners of more than 10% of a company's equity — must file a Form 4 within two business days of any change in their ownership of company stock or derivatives. The filing discloses the transaction type (purchase, sale, grant, exercise), the number of shares, the price per share, and the insider's resulting position. Form 4 data is the most direct public window into what people inside a company are doing with their own stock, which is why hedge funds, quant teams, and active investors treat it as a leading signal. All Form 4 filings are public on the SEC's EDGAR system within seconds of acceptance, and Form4API ingests every new Form 4 in real time from EDGAR's getcurrent feed — typically parsing it into structured JSON within about a minute of acceptance.

Question 2

How fast does the SEC publish Form 4 filings?

Accepted Answer

The SEC requires insiders to file Form 4 within two business days of a reportable transaction, and EDGAR — the SEC's public filing system — publishes accepted filings to the public archive within seconds of acceptance. Form4API ingests new Form 4 filings in real time from EDGAR's getcurrent feed — typically parsing each one into structured JSON and dispatching webhook events within a minute or two of the filing being accepted on EDGAR. For comparison, manually checking EDGAR or refreshing a vendor dashboard introduces minutes-to-hours of delay. Our amendment-aware parser also reconciles Form 4/A corrections automatically so downstream consumers never see double-counted transactions. Customers building trading strategies, alerting systems, or compliance dashboards rely on this end-to-end latency to act on insider signals before the broader market repositions.

Question 3

What's the difference between Form 4, Form 144, and 13F-HR?

Accepted Answer

These three SEC filings together describe what insiders and large investors are doing with U.S. equities, but each covers a different actor and a different transaction type. Form 4 is filed by corporate insiders (officers, directors, 10%-plus owners) within two business days of a change in their company stock ownership — it reports actual executed transactions. Form 144 is filed by the same kind of insider when they intend to sell restricted or control stock above a threshold; it's a notice of proposed sale, typically appearing about two business days before the matching Form 4 sale, making it an early signal on discretionary versus pre-scheduled disposals. 13F-HR is filed quarterly by institutional investment managers with at least $100 million in assets under management, disclosing all U.S. equity positions held at quarter-end. Form4API surfaces all three in a unified REST API with cross-references.

Question 4

Do you handle Form 4/A amendments?

Accepted Answer

Yes — and this is the most common place competitor APIs get it wrong. When an insider files an amendment to a previously-filed Form 4 (designated Form 4/A), they're correcting an error in the original — typically a wrong share count, a wrong transaction code, or a missing transaction. Naive ingestion pipelines treat the amendment as a brand-new filing, which silently double-counts the transaction in downstream analytics. Form4API's amendment-aware parser detects the amendment relationship via the EDGAR accession-number link, retires the original transaction, applies the corrected values in place, and exposes a single canonical record at /v1/transactions with an isAmended flag and a link back to the original. Cluster-signal calculations, sentiment scoring, and any aggregations you build on top automatically use the corrected data. No reconciliation logic required in your code — the API guarantees one transaction per real-world event regardless of how many amendments the insider files.

Question 5

Is this real SEC EDGAR data?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Every Form 4, Form 144, and 13F-HR filing exposed through Form4API is fetched directly from the SEC's public EDGAR system, parsed from the original XML or HTML source, and stored without modification of values, dates, or counterparty information. No values are derived, estimated, smoothed, or back-filled. The only enrichments we add are amendment-aware reconciliation (which corrects double-counts that exist in raw EDGAR), CUSIP-to-ticker mapping for 13F holdings (using OpenFIGI's authoritative database), 10b5-1 plan detection, and cluster-buy/sell signal flags — every one of these enrichments is computed from the underlying SEC data and is reversible to the original filing via the accession number we return on every record. Because the source is 100% public, you are never paying for the data itself — you are paying for sub-3-minute latency, amendment correctness, webhook delivery, and the unified schema across three filing types.

Question 6

How does Form4API compare to sec-api.io or EODHD?

Accepted Answer

Form4API is the only one of the three with HMAC-signed webhooks by default — sec-api.io's real-time option is a WebSocket stream on its $199+/mo Business tier, and EODHD refreshes insider data on a daily batch. sec-api.io covers far more SEC form types overall, and EODHD bundles insider data into a broader market-data platform, so the right fit depends on whether push delivery or breadth matters more.

Question 7

Can I cancel anytime?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Monthly subscriptions can be cancelled at any time from your billing page. You keep access until the end of the current billing period.

Question 8

What counts as a request?

Accepted Answer

Every call to a data endpoint (transactions, filings, insiders, companies, signals) counts as one request. Health checks and webhook management calls are free.

Question 9

What happens when I hit the rate limit?

Accepted Answer

Requests return 429 with a Retry-After header telling you exactly how many seconds to wait. Nothing is lost — just retry after the cooldown.

The insider trading API for real-time SEC Form 4 data.

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What you only get here

Insider × institutional, in one query

Amendment-aware

Form 144 intent-to-sellBusiness

Insider sentiment scoreBusiness

10b5-1 plan detection

Self-serve webhooks

Post-trade returns, every tier

Who uses Form4API

Quant & algo traders

Fintech newsletters

AI investment agents

Corporate IR teams

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Usage

Simple, transparent pricing

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