How can you get free alerts for new SEC filings?

Which feeds does the SEC offer?

The SEC's RSS Feeds page describes feeds for the most recent SEC materials (press releases, speeches, litigation releases and others) and, separately, for EDGAR searches. For company filings, the page says that some EDGAR search results can be captured as RSS feeds, and that the RSS link on various EDGAR searches is located on the left, immediately above the filings result list.

Two searches are named:

• Company Search. Find the company, subscribe to the search, and you receive the most recent filings from that company. You can narrow the feed by filing type.
• Latest Filings. Subscribe to all filings, or filter by company, CIK or form type. You can also choose to include, exclude or select only ownership filings, meaning Forms 3, 4 and 5.

How do you set up an alert for one company's insider trades?

1. Open the SEC Search Filings page and search for the company by name or ticker.
2. Set the ownership forms option (Forms 3, 4 and 5) to Only, so the list holds insider filings only.
3. Copy the RSS link shown above the result list into a feed reader. The SEC notes that most current browsers include an RSS component that lets a user subscribe to and combine feeds.

For the same idea across the whole market, the Latest Filings search can be filtered to ownership forms, with the form type or a company or CIK as extra filters. The same approach works for other forms by choosing a different form type, for example the stake reports described in Schedule 13D versus 13G.

What about email?

The RSS page lists an "Email update service for non-EDGAR postings" and adds, in brackets, that it is not available for company filings. So the SEC's own email sign-up will not tell you about a new Form 4. Feeds are the SEC's free route, and a feed reader or an automation tool can turn a feed into an email.

Is there anything faster?

The Search Filings page also lists the EDGAR Public Dissemination Service, described as an option to subscribe to a privatized system to receive a dedicated feed of all public EDGAR filings. That is a different kind of service from the free feeds and is for people who want every filing. The page does not give a price, and this article does not either.

What are the rules if you poll EDGAR with a program?

Programs that fetch EDGAR pages are asked, on the SEC's page on accessing EDGAR data, to declare their user agent in the request headers (a company name and a contact address), and the SEC says it does not provide technical support for scripted processes. A feed reader that follows the official RSS link is the simple way to stay within the intended use.

How soon will an alert arrive?

An alert can only be as early as the filing. A Form 4 is due within two business days after the transaction, so a trade can happen and take until the end of the second business day to be reported (see Forms 3, 4 and 5 explained). The Latest Filings view is described by the SEC as a listing of filings as they are submitted into EDGAR, so a feed built on it follows the system closely. OQRO reads the SEC's live filing feed about every five minutes on US business days and publishes the measured delay of each source on its status page.

What is a sensible setup?

A practical order of work, using only the SEC's own tools. First decide the question: one company, one form type, or all ownership filings across the market. Second, pick the narrowest feed that answers it, because a Company Search feed filtered to ownership forms is much shorter than a market-wide feed. Third, check the feed against EDGAR: confirm that a recent filing you can see on the Search Filings page also appears in the feed. Fourth, if a program polls the feed, declare a user agent as the SEC asks. Fifth, treat the feed entry as a pointer and the filing as the record.

A feed reader shows new items as they arrive. Whether a given item matters is a separate judgment that the feed does not make.

When is a feed the wrong tool?

A feed lists filings only. It is a poor fit when you need an interpretation of a filing, a total across many filings or a comparison with other data. It is also no replacement for reading the filing: the feed says a Form 4 exists, and the form's footnotes, tables and checkboxes say what it reports. For a combined view of several kinds of disclosure, a tracker does the assembly; for the authoritative record, the filing on sec.gov remains the source.

What this does not tell you

A feed entry gives the company, the form type and a link. It does not say what is in the filing, whether the trade was planned, or whether it matters. You still have to open each item, and for a Form 4 that means reading the tables and footnotes (see how to read the tables on a Form 4). A busy company can generate many entries a day. An alert about a filing says that something was filed; it does not rank it, interpret it or predict anything.