Insider filings

SEC insider filings show how company directors, executives, shareholders who own more than 10%, and other reporting owners acquire, dispose of, and hold a company's securities. They cover ordinary purchases and sales as well as stock awards, option exercises, gifts, conversions, and ownership through trusts or other entities.

Use the transaction endpoints to screen that activity across companies or follow new disclosures as they arrive. Retrieve the filing itself when you need to understand the disclosure as a whole, including its reporting owners, standalone holdings, footnotes, signatures, and amendment details.

How insider reporting works

Each filing identifies an issuer, the company whose securities are being reported, and one or more reporting owners, the people or entities making the disclosure. It then describes their ownership in a set of SEC tables.

The SEC separates securities into two broad groups. A non-derivative security, such as common stock, represents the ownership interest directly. A derivative security, such as a stock option or warrant, has terms tied to an underlying security and can include an exercise price, exercise date, and expiration date.

Each group can contain two kinds of rows:

• Transaction rows describe an acquisition, disposition, exercise, conversion, award, gift, or other reported event
• Holding rows disclose an ownership position without reporting a transaction for that row

A single filing can contain several rows from both groups. The accession number identifies the filing that connects them.

Understanding transaction rows

A filing is not the same thing as a transaction. One Form 4 can report several related actions, and each action appears on its own line in an SEC transaction table. The API preserves that line-level structure so the actions remain independently searchable and their source values are not collapsed together.

Each transaction row tells you:

• Who reported it? The issuer and reporting owners identify the company and insiders
• What happened? The transaction code identifies the event; the acquired-or-disposed code says whether the row added to or reduced the reported position
• When did it happen? The transaction date comes from the ownership table, not the filing timestamp
• How large was it? Shares and price preserve the quantities supplied by the filer
• What remained afterward? Shares owned after the transaction records the balance reported for that row

Consider an executive who exercises stock options and immediately sells the resulting shares. The exercise concerns a derivative security: the option. The sale concerns a non-derivative security: the common stock received through the exercise. The Form 4 can therefore produce two transaction rows, even though the actions are part of one broader event.

Keep those rows separate and use accession_numberto connect them to the same filing. Collapsing them would hide the option exercise, the share sale, or both.

Decimal values are returned as strings so they retain the precision reported by the filer. A null means the source did not provide a usable value. transaction_total_value appears only when it was reported; it is not calculated from shares and price.

Transaction codes

The transaction code identifies the kind of event being disclosed. It does not, by itself, tell you whether an insider's economic exposure increased or decreased. Read it together with the acquired-or-disposed code, the reported quantities, and any footnotes.

The API reference documents every supported code. The SEC also publishes the authoritative ownership transaction code reference.

When to read the filing

Transaction rows are useful for screening and comparison, but they are not a substitute for the complete filing. Read the filing whenever the meaning of an event depends on its footnotes, the relationship among several rows, or the identities of the reporting owners.

Footnotes are the most common reason to do this. They can explain a weighted-average sale price, vesting schedule, indirect ownership arrangement, unusual transaction code, or amendment. The filing detail returns each footnote once, andfield_footnote_ids identifies the fields it qualifies.

The filing also provides the full reporting-owner relationships. One filing can name several owners, but the source does not generally assign every transaction to only one of them. The API therefore preserves the filing-level owner list instead of inventing a more precise attribution.

Finally, use the filing when you need standalone holdings. A transaction's shares_owned_after is the balance reported after that event. A holding row is a separate disclosure of an ownership position without a transaction for that row.

Forms and publication

Forms 3, 4, and 5 serve different points in the Section 16 reporting cycle:

• Form 3 reports an insider's initial beneficial ownership
• Form 4 reports changes in beneficial ownership
• Form 5 reports annual or deferred Section 16 activity
• An /A suffix identifies an amendment

When you are analyzing when activity occurred, usetransaction_date. Thefiled_at timestamp tells you when the SEC accepted the filing. This distinction matters most for Form 5, which can disclose activity from an earlier period.

EDGAR operates from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Eastern Time on SEC business days. Ownership filings accepted before 10:00 p.m. can be disseminated the same day. The public ownership feed is checked once per minute during that window, after which a new filing must be fetched, parsed, and published.

The acceptance timestamp does not identify the exact moment a filing became publicly retrievable, and the polling cadence is not an end-to-end latency guarantee. See the SEC guidance on accessing EDGAR data.

Amendments

An amendment is a separate filing with its own accession. It can correct filing metadata, reported values, or ownership rows. Section 16 filings do not provide one universal machine-readable rule for matching every amended row to the row it changes.

For that reason, the API preserves each accession as filed. It does not silently rewrite the original filing or replace individual transactions. Use the amendment form, original-submission date, remarks, and footnotes to understand the correction.

Choose an endpoint

Transaction lists and the feed cover transaction rows from Forms 4 and 5. Filing detail also supports Form 3 and returns owners, holdings, signatures, footnotes, and amendment context.