Tutorial to Easily Auto Track Insider Transactions
Track Insider Transactions
Do you need a pro tracker to Track Insider Transactions? | Flickr: West Midlands Police
Is There a Way to Track Insider Transactions
Here’s a quick tutorial on how to set up an RSS feed for your company’s insider transactions and track insider transactions.
This is something that is extremely quick and easy to set up. Once you get an idea of how this works, you’ll be able to fiddle around with it to search for other specific forms filed to the SEC.
Before that, please click on the image below to download a PDF version of this article.
Basics First. All Forms Have Header Information
Whenever a company files their form to the SEC, there is a certain format that must be followed. For example, you can’t just write an annual report and then email it to the SEC.
Each form much comply and contain certain information. That’s where header fields come in. Don’t worry if you don’t know what they are. You just have to know the basics of how to read it.
Below the text between the “< >” is what you call the header field. As you can see below, there are several and you can use each one in your search. Think of it as a filter in your search.
Company Name
CIK
Public Document Count
Accession Number
Form Type
Period
Filing Date
You could use “COMPANY-NAME” to search for a specific company only or include “TYPE” and you can search a specific type of form for a company. This is exactly what I will show you to collect insider transaction filings for a single company.
This is the SEC page for the full list of all header fields you can use to customize your search.
First: Search for Company Name
Go the SEC Archives Search page. This is the page which you want to use for searching.
In the field, enter COMPANY-NAME=”apple” and search.
You will notice that the results display everything containing the word apple. The next step is to clean up the results by using the exact company name as reported in the SEC. In this case, it is “apple inc”. Not case sensitive.
Updating the search term with COMPANY-NAME=”apple inc” now lists filings only for AAPL.
Second: Include Form Type Filter
To narrow your search to include only insider transactions, you will have to search for form 4.
Include FORM-TYPE=4 into your search.
The search term should now be COMPANY-NAME=”apple inc” FORM-TYPE=4
The SEC has kindly added a RSS button so that you can add it to your reader or email. Click and subscribe to it and you’ll be sure to receive it as soon as form 4 is filed.
Advanced Searching Using Boolean Operators
For those of you want a bit more flavor, you can refine your searches even finer by using boolean operators AND and OR.
The easiest way to explain things without going into the jargon is to just see an example first.
COMPANY-NAME=(“apple inc” OR “netflix”) AND FORM-TYPE=(10-Q* OR 10-K*)
In the search string above, I want to find filings for both Apple and Netflix and display both the quarterly and annual reports.
But look, I am not using the AND operator.
The OR operator returns filings for either
- Apple or Netflix
- and 10-Q or 10-K.
Use the speech marks ” ” if the company name has a space in it and the * is used to display any filing beginning with 10-Q. By using the asterisk you can search for amended filings that have the code 10-Q/A. If you just did FORM-TYPE=(10-Q OR 10-K), you wouldn’t see any of the amended filings.
For a list of all the other forms, this is the pdf you want.
And that’s how we Track Insider Transactions in OSV. What’s your customized search string? Share it with us in the comments.
