How do you find a company's insider trades on EDGAR?

What are the steps?

The SEC's Search Filings page offers free public access to the documents that listed companies and others file in EDGAR. To list a company's insider filings:

1. Go to Search Filings and use Company Search. Type the company's name or ticker symbol. The page notes that you can find registration statements, periodic reports and other forms this way.
2. Next to "Ownership Forms 3, 4, and 5", choose Only. The same control offers Include and Exclude. Choosing Only limits the list to insider ownership filings.
3. Open a result. A Form 4 shows who filed it, the company, and a table of transactions (see how to read the tables on a Form 4).
4. To follow a person instead of a company, use the CIK Lookup tool listed on the same page, which the SEC describes as a search engine for Central Index Key numbers assigned to corporate or individual filers.

A company's insiders are listed as reporting persons on each filing, so one company search surfaces filings from many people.

Which other SEC tools help?

The Search Filings page lists the other ways in:

• Full Text Search. The EDGAR full-text search gives access to the full text of electronic filings since 2001, with filters for date, company, person and filing category. It is good for finding a phrase, for example a footnote.
• Latest Filings. A listing of filings as they are submitted, and daily filings by form type for the past week.
• EDGAR APIs. The SEC documents RESTful interfaces that include the submissions history by filer, useful if you want to read many filings by program.
• RSS feeds. For alerts, see how to get free alerts for new SEC filings.

The SEC also publishes Insider Transactions Data Sets, a bulk-data product for analysis. EDGAR itself began in 1994 and 1995, according to the SEC's page on accessing EDGAR data.

What are the rules for automated access?

If you fetch EDGAR pages by script, the same SEC page asks you to declare your user agent in the request headers, with a company name and a contact address, and says the SEC does not offer technical support for scripted processes. Reading pages by hand in a browser needs none of this.

How current is it?

A Form 4 is due within two business days of the transaction, so a trade from this morning may not be on EDGAR yet. The Latest Filings view shows filings close to when they are accepted. Planned sales are announced separately on a Form 144, which can appear before the sale.

What is slow or hard about raw EDGAR?

EDGAR is the authority, but it is built as a filing archive, not as a reader. Each Form 4 is a separate document; there is no built-in plain-language summary, no running total for a person across filings, and no side-by-side with other kinds of disclosure. Footnotes carry meaning that the main table does not, and plan-based sales are only marked by a checkbox. A tracker saves the assembly work; the official filing remains the record, and any tracker's line should link to it. OQRO's insider trades page does that for covered companies, and its coverage and update frequency are described on the coverage page.

What does Include, Exclude or Only change?

The Ownership Forms 3, 4 and 5 control on Company Search has three settings, according to the Search Filings page. Include mixes insider forms in with the company's other filings. Exclude hides them. Only shows nothing but insider forms. For a first look at insider activity, Only is the setting that removes the annual reports, quarterly reports and other filings so that the list is short enough to scan.

How far back can you look?

EDGAR began in 1994 and 1995, per the SEC's page on accessing EDGAR data, and the full-text search covers filings since 2001. For a company that has been listed for decades, insider filings from the earliest years may be absent or paper-based. For a recent question, such as what the officers did in the last year, a company search filtered to ownership forms is enough.

Open each filing from the list rather than relying on the list line alone. The list shows the form type and the filing date; the trade date, price and amount are inside the document. Filing date and trade date can differ by up to two business days when the filing is on time.

What this does not tell you

A list of Forms 4 is a list of reports, not a verdict. It does not say why a person traded, whether a trade was planned in advance unless the plan box or a footnote says so, or whether a given person has information others lack. The SEC's own bulletin notes that insiders may sell for liquidity and diversification, among other reasons. A missing filing in your search may only mean it has not been filed yet, or that the person's CIK or the company's name was typed differently.