SEC Form 4 (insider trading disclosure)
A Form 4 is a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing that corporate insiders — officers, directors, and any shareholder with more than 10% beneficial ownership — must submit within two business days of any transaction in their company's securities. Required under Section 16(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.
What's in a Form 4
- Insider's name and relationship to the company (CEO, CFO, director, 10% owner, etc.)
- Transaction date and type (purchase, sale, gift, award, stock option exercise, etc.)
- Number of shares
- Price per share
- Total resulting holdings after the transaction
- Whether the transaction was direct or indirect ownership
Why it matters for trading
Insider purchases — especially cluster buys by multiple insiders on the same day — have been studied as bullish signals. The reasoning: insiders have asymmetric information about the company's prospects and rarely buy ahead of bad news. The Lakonishok and Lee (2001) study and a long line of follow-up research showed insider buying systematically outperforms insider selling as a predictive signal.
Insider selling is more ambiguous because executives have many reasons to sell (diversification, tax planning, 10b5-1 plans) that aren't necessarily bearish. Cluster selling by multiple unrelated insiders on the same day carries more weight than a single CFO trimming.
How Top Tier Newswire surfaces it
Every Form 4 filing is parsed within minutes of posting to SEC EDGAR. Pro subscribers receive real-time alerts; the live terminal's Insider modal shows the rolling window with filter, sort, and ticker-pivot. The public ticker pages at /insider/$TICKER show the 90-day delayed history.