Monitor Insider Trading Without Parsing SEC XML — Form 4 Data as Clean JSON

Monitor Insider Trading Without Parsing SEC XML — Form 4 Data as Clean JSON SEC Form 4 filings are one of the most useful public datasets for tracking what company insiders (CEOs, directors, 10% owners) are doing with their stock. When a CEO buys 50,000 shares of their own company, that's a signal. The problem: getting this data from SEC EDGAR is genuinely painful. The EDGAR Problem EDGAR serves filings as nested XML/SGML documents. There's no proper REST API for structured Form 4 data. Here's what you're dealing with: CIK-based lookups: You need to map ticker symbols to CIK numbers (EDGAR's internal ID system) Full-text search returns everything: Searching for "AAPL" returns all 100+ filing types — 10-Ks, 8-Ks, proxies — not just insider trades XML parsing: Form 4 filings use XBRL/XML with nested schemas. The actual transaction data is buried inside <nonDerivativeTransaction> and <derivativeTransaction> elements No pagination or filtering: EDGAR's XBRL feeds dump everythin