The Insider Trading Desk

SEC Form 4 is the public filing that company insiders — officers, directors, and shareholders owning more than 10% of a public company's stock — must submit to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission within two business days of any change in their ownership. Every CEO bonus, every director stock sale, every CFO open-market purchase is disclosed in a Form 4 and made publicly available on SEC EDGAR. Stock Alerts ingests these filings the moment they are published, parses the underlying XML, and surfaces every transaction here in one searchable feed.

Form 4 is the public disclosure that company insiders — officers, directors, and shareholders with more than 10% of a company's stock — must file with the SEC within two business days of any change in their ownership of company securities.

An open-market purchase (P) means the insider bought shares on a public exchange with their own money. An open-market sale (S) means the insider sold shares on a public exchange. Only these two codes represent true market conviction — all other codes (M, A, F, G, etc.) are compensation-related or non-market events.

• P — Open-market purchase. The single most-watched code. An insider bought stock on the open market with their own money. Widely considered a bullish signal.
• S — Open-market sale. The insider sold stock on the open market. Often (but not always) interpreted as bearish.
• M — Option exercise. The insider converted stock options into shares. Frequently followed by an S sale to cover taxes.
• A — Grant or award. New shares granted by the company as compensation.
• F — Tax withholding. Shares automatically surrendered to cover income tax on vesting.
• G — Gift. Shares transferred without consideration (e.g. to a family trust or charity).

Insiders sell stock for many reasons — diversification, tax planning, real-estate purchases, charitable donations, court orders. They buy for only one: they believe the stock is undervalued. Academic studies (Lakonishok and Lee 2001; Cohen, Malloy, and Pomorski 2012) have repeatedly shown that open-market insider purchases significantly outperform the market, especially when concentrated among C-suite executives or when multiple insiders buy at the same time (a "cluster buy"). This page lets you screen for exactly those signals.

• See live buys and sells filtered by transaction type, ticker symbol, dollar value, and time window.
• Identify cluster buys — multiple insiders at the same company purchasing within days of each other.
• Filter by ticker to see the entire insider history for any S&P 500 or Russell 3000 company.
• Click any trade to open a dedicated detail page with full transaction breakdown, post-trade holdings, footnotes, and the original SEC source.

The "High Value" tab filters for open-market buys or sells where the total dollar value of the transaction is at least $1,000,000. This focuses on trades large enough to represent a meaningful financial commitment by the insider.

Most insider filings at large-cap companies are grants, RSU vestings, option exercises, or tax-withholding surrenders — none of which are open-market transactions. "Other Only" means the company has recent Form 4 filings but no open-market purchases or sales during the selected window.

Yes. The free Stock Alerts mobile app can notify you the moment a new Form 4 is filed by any officer or director — filter by ticker, transaction code, or dollar threshold. Pair it with our congressional stock trading tracker and 13F institutional holdings feed for a complete view of every dollar of smart money on the move.