An SEC Form 4 API
built from the filings.
Every SEC Form 4 becomes one structured JSON event minutes after it hits EDGAR: who traded, which side, how many shares, at what average price, for how much, and whether it ran under a 10b5-1 plan. Auth is one Bearer header.
curl https://api.alphai.io/api/news/insider/ \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $ALPHAI_API_KEY" \
-G -d "symbol=NVDA" -d "min_relevance=6"One filing, one event
A 10b5-1 ladder sale spanning 25 tranches arrives as one row with summed shares and value, not 25 rows of noise. Grouping is by transaction code and holding form, so buys never blend with sells.
Numbers, not prose
Headlines and summaries are deterministic templates built from the filing itself, and every event carries a structured block with the exact figures. No model paraphrases the disclosure on the way to you.
Scored for size
Each event gets a relevance score computed from the transaction itself: total value, buy versus sell, plan or discretionary. The same filing always scores the same, so min_relevance= works as a size filter.
Same shape as news
Insider events use the same JSON envelope as every other article in the feed, so one parser handles both. Median time from EDGAR publication to a queryable event is about 6 minutes.
What an event looks like.
Each item pairs the templated article (title, summary, filing URL) with a structured insider block your code can branch on. Money and share fields are decimal strings to preserve precision, and side is already mapped from the SEC transaction code, so a bot does not have to re-derive the trade direction from a headline.
The feed currently runs at roughly 120 events a day across more than a thousand tickers. Direct and indirect legs of the same plan surface as separate events on purpose: they are distinct economic events, so sum them rather than dedupe by filing URL.
{
"results": [
{
"original": {
"uid": "3f9c2a7d81e4b6a0",
"title": "Jane E. Calloway bought $2.4M of ACME",
"url": "https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/.../form4.xml",
"summary": "Jane E. Calloway (Director) bought 60,000 shares of Acme Industries (ACME) at an average of $40.11 ($2.4M) across 2 trades on 2026-07-09.",
"time_published": "2026-07-09T21:42:10Z",
"source": "SEC EDGAR",
"source_domain": "sec.gov",
"ownership_form": "direct"
},
"enrichment": {
"category": "insider",
"tickers": ["ACME"],
"relevance_score": 7,
"ai_trading_insights": { "...": "per-ticker analysis" }
},
"insider": {
"side": "buy",
"transaction_code": "P",
"shares": "60000",
"avg_price_usd": "40.11",
"total_value_usd": "2406600",
"is_10b5_1": false,
"insider_name": "Jane E. Calloway",
"insider_title": "Director",
"is_officer": false,
"is_director": true,
"is_ten_percent_owner": false,
"transaction_date": "2026-07-09"
}
}
],
"next_cursor": "cD0yMDI2LTA3LTA5KzIxJTNBNDIlM0ExMA"
}Endpoints
stableAuthenticate with Authorization: Bearer ak_live_…. Quotas are two-layer, a per-minute burst cap and a per-day volume cap, counted per account. The full endpoint map, request playground, and OpenAPI schema live on /developers.
The same events, without polling.
Alerts
Subscribe to a ticker in /account/alerts and get new insider filings by email as they post, or as a daily digest.
Webhooks · Pro
Register an HTTPS endpoint and receive an HMAC-signed POST for every matching event, in the same JSON shape as the feed. Details and the signature scheme are on /developers.
MCP server
AI agents can pull the same insider events through the alphai MCP server at mcp.alphai.io, with per-ticker insider summaries exposed as tools. The API key that reads this feed authenticates there too.
Questions, answered.
The short version of where the data comes from, what the free tier covers, and what you would otherwise build yourself.
New to Form 4 filings themselves? Start with the primer.
Is there a free SEC Form 4 API?
Yes. The Free plan includes one API key with 20 requests a minute and 100 a day, and signing up does not ask for a credit card. That covers evaluation and prototypes; production and commercial use need a Basic or Pro plan, which also open more of the news archive.
Where does the Form 4 data come from?
From SEC EDGAR. A dedicated worker tails the Form 4 feed around the clock and turns each filing into a structured event within minutes of publication. Form 4 is the document a company officer, director, or 10%+ shareholder must file within two business days of trading their company's stock, so coverage spans every US-listed company with reportable insider activity.
Is this a general SEC EDGAR API?
No, and it is worth being precise about that. This API covers one filing type, the Form 4 insider transaction report. It does not serve 10-K, 10-Q, S-1, or EDGAR full-text search. If you need the wider form set, EDGAR publishes its own free JSON endpoints and several commercial services wrap them. Reach for this one when Form 4 is what you actually want, already parsed into economic events instead of raw XML.
Does OpenInsider have an API?
No. OpenInsider is a screener for browsing Form 4 filings on the web and does not offer a public API. If you need the same class of data programmatically, this API serves Form 4 events as JSON under an API key, with a free tier to start on.
How is this different from parsing SEC EDGAR myself?
EDGAR is free and parsing it yourself is a fine option. What the API saves you is the pipeline: XML parsing across filing variants, grouping a filing's tranches into one economic event, value-weighted price averaging, mapping issuers to tickers, and keeping direct and indirect legs of the same plan separate. On top of the parsed data you get a reproducible relevance score for size-based filtering, plus alerts, webhooks, and an MCP server that speak the same format.
What is in the insider block of each event?
The trade side (buy, sell, or other), the raw SEC transaction code, total shares, the value-weighted average price, total dollar value, a 10b5-1 plan flag, the insider's name and title, officer, director and 10%-owner flags, and the transaction date. Money and share fields are decimal strings to preserve precision.
Read the filings by the request.
Sign up, generate a key in your account, and the first call is a minute away. No credit card on the Free plan.
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