How to Search SEC Form 4 Filings: EDGAR and API Options

SEC Form 4 filings show when a company insider, such as an officer, director or large shareholder, buys or sells shares. You can find them two ways: search EDGAR for one company or insider at a time, or query a parsed dataset if you need to filter by transaction type, price or value across many filers at once.

This guide walks through both paths and where each one runs out.

What a Form 4 filing is

Form 4 is the SEC's "Statement of Changes in Beneficial Ownership," filed under Section 16(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. It is filed by:

• Directors and officers of a public company.
• Any shareholder who beneficially owns more than 10% of a registered class of the company's equity securities.

A Form 4 is due within two business days after the transaction it reports. Each filing can cover one or more transactions for one insider at one company, and every row in the transaction table carries a transaction code such as P (open market purchase), S (open market sale), A (grant or award), M (option exercise), F (shares withheld for taxes) or G (gift).

Searching Form 4 filings on EDGAR by company

The most direct path is EDGAR's company search. Look up the issuer by ticker or CIK, then filter the filing list to form type 4. This shows every Form 4 filed on behalf of that company's insiders, in order, with a link to each filing's XML and human-readable view.

This works well when you already know the company and just want its recent insider activity. It has two limits:

1. You see one company at a time. There is no way to pull every Form 4 filed market-wide for a given week from this page.
2. The list does not show transaction codes, prices or share counts. You have to open each filing to see what actually happened.

Searching by full text

EDGAR Full Text Search indexes the text of every filing submitted electronically since 2001, and it can filter by form type and date range. It is built to find a word or phrase inside a document, for example a filer's name as it appears in cover-page text, not to filter on structured fields like transaction code or dollar value. For Form 4s specifically, the data you usually want, who sold, how many shares, at what price, lives in the XML transaction table, not in free text, so full text search will find the filing but will not let you filter on what it reports.

Searching by insider name instead of company

Form 4 filings are indexed by issuer CIK, not by a searchable directory of insider names. If you know which company an insider is tied to, you can find their filings through that company's filing history. If you only know the person's name and not the company, EDGAR does not offer a market-wide name search for Section 16 filers from its public search pages. A dataset that has parsed the owner name out of every Form 4's XML is the practical way to find every filing for a given insider across every company they serve.

Searching across every company at once

None of EDGAR's search tools answer a question like "show me every open-market purchase over $100,000 filed this week, from any company." That requires reading the structured XML of every Form 4 and filtering on the parsed fields, which means either downloading and parsing each filing yourself or using an API that has already done it.

SecFeed parses every Form 4 (along with Forms 3 and 5) into rows with the owner, role, transaction code, price, share count and 10b5-1 plan flag attached. For example, to see every open-market purchase over $100,000 reported today:

curl "https://secfeedapi.com/v1/insider-trading?code=P&minValue=100000&startDate=2026-10-27" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

A row in the response looks like this:

{
  "ticker": "EXMP",
  "cik": "0001234567",
  "owner": "JANE DOE",
  "role": "Director",
  "code": "P",
  "shares": 5000,
  "price": 42.10,
  "value": 210500,
  "is10b5One": false,
  "filedAt": "2026-10-27"
}

To track one insider across every company they are tied to, query by owner instead of ticker. In Python:

from secfeed import Client

sf = Client("YOUR_API_KEY")
trades = sf.insider_trades(owner="JANE DOE", code="P")
for t in trades:
    print(t["ticker"], t["filedAt"], t["shares"], t["price"])

The same endpoint also accepts cik, formType, startDate, endDate and paging with from and size, so you can scope a search to one company, one insider or the whole market with the same call. See the insider trading API for the full parameter list, or the EDGAR filing query API if you need to search filing text or metadata across all form types, not just ownership forms.

Which search method fits your question

Frequently asked questions

Can I search Form 4 filings by insider name on EDGAR directly?

Not from a market-wide name index on EDGAR's public search pages. You can find an insider's filings once you know which company's filing history to look in, or through a dataset that has extracted the owner name field from every Form 4.

Does EDGAR full text search cover Form 4 filings?

Yes, it indexes Form 4 text filed since 2001, but it searches document text and metadata, not the structured transaction fields like code, price or share count.

What is the fastest way to find a specific insider's trades?

If you know the company, use EDGAR's company search filtered to form type 4. If you need to filter by transaction type, price or date range, or search across more than one company, a parsed API call is faster than opening each filing by hand.

How soon after a trade does a Form 4 appear?

Section 16 insiders must file within two business days of the transaction date, so Form 4 data is close to real time compared with quarterly filings like 13F.

Are Form 4 filings the same as Form 3 and Form 5?

No. Form 3 is the initial ownership statement filed when someone first becomes an insider. Form 4 reports a change in ownership. Form 5 is an annual catch-all for transactions that were eligible for deferred reporting during the year.