What is SEC Form 4?
A Form 4 is the document a corporate insider must file with the SEC within two business days of buying or selling their company’s stock. Its formal name is the Statement of Changes in Beneficial Ownership, and it is the reason insider trading by executives is public record: every reportable trade becomes a filing on SEC EDGAR that anyone can read, at no cost, usually the same week the trade happened.
This site is built from those filings. The buy feed and sale feed are Form 4s, parsed and sorted, the day they arrive.
Who has to file one
Section 16 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 applies to three groups at any company with a class of registered equity:
- Directors — every member of the board.
- Officers — the president, the principal financial and accounting officers, vice presidents in charge of principal business units, and anyone else who performs a policy-making function. Job titles vary; the test is the function.
- 10% owners — any person or entity beneficially owning more than ten percent of a registered class of the company’s equity. This is how funds and founders show up in the data alongside executives.
What a Form 4 contains
Four things matter on the form itself:
- The relationship — checkboxes for director, officer (with title), 10% owner, or other. Who is trading matters as much as what they traded.
- Table I — non-derivative transactions: common stock bought, sold, granted, gifted or withheld, each line carrying a date, a one-letter transaction code, a share count, a price, and the shares owned after the transaction.
- Table II — derivative transactions: options, RSUs, warrants and convertibles, with exercise prices and expiration dates.
- The footnotes — the “explanation of responses,” where the real story often lives: trust arrangements, plan details, price ranges behind a weighted average.
Since 2023 the form also carries a checkbox declaring whether the trade was made under a pre-scheduled Rule 10b5-1 trading plan — the single most useful context flag on a sale.
What a Form 4 is not
It is not a prediction, and one filing is rarely a signal by itself. Most Form 4 volume is compensation plumbing — grants vesting, options exercised, shares withheld for taxes — reported with the same two-day urgency as a conviction buy. The skill is separating the two, which is what the code reference and the research guide are for. It also only covers the company’s own securities: an executive’s trades in other stocks are not Section 16 events.
Common questions
How quickly must a Form 4 be filed?
Before the end of the second business day after the trade is executed. The deadline has been two business days since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act took effect in August 2002; before that, insiders had until the tenth day of the following month.
Where can I see Form 4 filings for free?
Every Form 4 is public on SEC EDGAR the day it is accepted, and this site republishes them as browsable daily feeds, company pages and insider pages at no cost, with no account and no delay.
Does a Form 4 mean an insider knows something?
Not by itself. Most filings report routine compensation events like grants and option exercises. Open-market purchases — transaction code P — are the lines most worth attention, because they are an insider choosing to spend their own cash.
What is the difference between Form 4 and Form 144?
Form 4 reports a completed change in ownership by a Section 16 insider. Form 144 is a notice of intent to sell restricted or control stock under Rule 144 — a different rule with different filers, and a sale noticed on a 144 still produces a Form 4 when a Section 16 insider executes it.
Keep reading
- How to read a Form 4 — A walkthrough of a Form 4 insider filing: the relationship boxes, every Table I and Table II column, the footnotes, and the Rule 10b5-1 checkbox.
- Form 4 filing deadlines — When a Form 4 is due: the two-business-day rule from Sarbanes-Oxley, EDGAR’s 10 pm cutoff, the narrow exceptions, and what actually happens to late filers.
- Form 3 vs Form 4 vs Form 5 — The three Section 16 ownership forms compared: Form 3 when you become an insider, Form 4 within two business days of a trade, Form 5 as the annual catch-up.
- Transaction codes — What each SEC Form 4 transaction code means — P, S, A, M, F, G and the rest — and which ones are real open-market trades.
- Rule 10b5-1 trading plans — What a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan is, the 2023 cooling-off and disclosure amendments, the Form 4 checkbox, and how to read planned versus discretionary trades.
- What is insider trading? — Insider trading is legal when insiders report their trades and illegal when anyone trades on material non-public information.
- Reading insider buying — Which insider-buying patterns carry information according to the published research — cluster buys, purchase size versus stake, the buyer’s role — and which are noise.