// insider-trading-api

The SEC insider trading API for developers

Real-time access to every Form 4, Form 144, and 13F-HR filing from SEC EDGAR. Webhooks fire within minutes of acceptance. Amendment-aware, 10b5-1 plan-flagged, with 3+ years of historical data. Built for developers, quants, and fintech teams who need clean structured data — without writing an EDGAR scraper.

500 free requests/day · no credit card · up and running in two minutes

// definition

What is an insider trading API?

An insider trading API is a programmatic interface that exposes corporate-insider transaction data — purchases, sales, grants, option exercises — filed by directors, officers, and 10%-plus shareholders with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. These filings, principally on Form 4 under Section 16(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, are public record and must be filed within two business days of the transaction.

An insider trading API parses every new Form 4 from the SEC's EDGAR system and exposes the data as structured JSON: ticker, insider name and role, transaction code, shares, price, value, post-transaction holdings, and references to the originating SEC filing. Typical buyers include quantitative trading desks, fintech application builders, news and research products, compliance teams, and investor relations tools.

Form4API extends the standard insider-trading endpoint set with Form 144 (intent-to-sell notices), 13F-HR (institutional holdings), and amendment-aware reconciliation across all of them.

// differentiators

Why Form4API for insider trading data?

See how these differentiators stack up against sec-api.io, EODHD, EdgarTools, and other providers in the full comparison.

// reference

Endpoints available in the API

Five primary list endpoints cover the full insider-trading and institutional-holdings surface. Authentication is a single API key in the X-Api-Key header — no OAuth, no token refresh. Responses are UTF-8 JSON; numbers are JSON numbers (not strings), monetary values in USD.

curl "https://api.form4api.com/v1/transactions?ticker=NVDA&code=P&per_page=5" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

curl "https://api.form4api.com/v1/filings?per_page=10" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

curl "https://api.form4api.com/v1/insiders/0001214156" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

curl "https://api.form4api.com/v1/signals?cluster_buy=true&per_page=5" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

curl "https://api.form4api.com/v1/holdings?ticker=AAPL&per_page=3" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

// build vs buy

Why use an API instead of scraping SEC EDGAR?

Building an in-house EDGAR scraper looks cheap on day one. By month three the hidden costs start to surface. The specific things that make a serious insider-trading pipeline harder than it looks:

• ·Form 4 XML schema variants. The SEC accepts more than a dozen filing-schema variations across the dataset. Each requires its own parser branch and validation. Form4API maintains the parser as a separate concern from your application code.
• ·Out-of-order amendments. Form 4/A amendments arrive after their originals — sometimes weeks later. A scraper without reconciliation logic will double-count the underlying transaction in every downstream aggregation. The API guarantees one canonical record per real-world event.
• ·EDGAR's fair-use ceiling. The SEC publishes a fair-use rate limit of 10 requests per second from a single User-Agent. A serious downstream gets rate-limited if it shares network with anything else on the same egress IP. The API absorbs that constraint.
• ·10b5-1 plan flagging. 10b5-1 plan detection requires reading the Form 4 footnote section, which is unstructured text. Form4API flags every such trade at the field level.
• ·CUSIP-to-ticker for 13F. Mapping the CUSIPs in 13F-HR holdings to tickers requires a separate paid OpenFIGI subscription or a maintenance commitment to keep your own mapping fresh. The API ships this resolved.

// real-time

Real-time webhooks for new insider filings

Subscribe a publicly-reachable HTTPS endpoint and receive a signed POST every time a new Form 4 transaction is parsed. Every tier, including Free's single read-only webhook, can subscribe to all three event types: TransactionFiled, ClusterBuy, and ClusterSell. Paid tiers raise the number of concurrent subscriptions, not which event types you can receive. Payloads are HMAC-signed, retries are automatic with exponential backoff, and the dispatcher continues serving live ingestion even when a subscriber endpoint is temporarily down.

POST /your-endpoint
X-Insider-Signature: sha256=<hmac>
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "eventType": "TransactionFiled",
  "occurredAt": "2026-06-07T13:42:18Z",
  "data": {
    "ticker": "NVDA",
    "insiderName": "Huang Jensen",
    "insiderTitle": "Chief Executive Officer",
    "transactionCode": "S",
    "isOpenMarket": true,
    "is10b5Plan": false,
    "sharesAmount": 240000,
    "pricePerShare": 875.40,
    "totalValue": 210096000.00,
    "transactionDate": "2026-06-05T00:00:00Z",
    "accessionNumber": "0001045810-26-000245"
  }
}

See the webhooks documentation for signature verification examples in Python, Node, and Go.

// pricing

Insider trading API pricing

Every tier uses the same base URL, auth, and response schema. Higher tiers raise quotas and unlock feature endpoints (signals, holdings, Form 144) and query-time filters (returns, trade size). No annual contracts, cancel any time.

See full plan comparison.

// faq

Frequently asked questions