What is an SEC Form 4?
Form 4 is the filing that officers, directors and owners of more than 10% of a US-listed company must send to the SEC within two business days after they buy, sell or otherwise change their holding of the company's stock.
Last reviewed October 5, 2026
Who has to file one
The people the law calls insiders: a company's officers, its directors and anyone who owns more than 10% of a class of its registered shares. The rule comes from Section 16 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.
When it is filed
Within two business days of the transaction, which makes it one of the fastest public disclosures in finance. By the time you read a Form 4, the trade is usually a few days old.
What it shows
- Who traded, their role, and which company
- The date, the number of shares and the price per share
- A one-letter code for what kind of transaction it was, such as P for an open-market purchase and S for an open-market sale
- How many shares the person owns afterwards, and whether they hold them directly or through a trust or family member
- Footnotes, including whether a sale was made under a pre-arranged plan
How to read it
Most lines on a Form 4 are routine: stock awards, option exercises and shares withheld to pay taxes. They are not a view on the company. The lines that carry a choice are the open-market purchase, where someone spent their own cash at the market price, and the open-market sale.
A sale says less than a purchase. People sell to pay taxes, to diversify, or under a plan decided months earlier. A filing tells you what happened, never why.
What OQRO does with it
Every insider purchase and sale on OQRO comes from a Form 4. OQRO separates open-market purchases and sales from the routine lines, marks sales whose footnotes say they followed a plan set up in advance, withholds prices that look like typing errors in the filing, and links each line to the original document on sec.gov.
See it on OQRO
Sources
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This explains a public filing in plain words. It is not legal or investment advice.
