Insider trading alerts: what an AI filter does with Form 4 noise

Insider trading alerts are notices that a company insider has filed a Form 4 with the SEC, and most of them are noise: stock grants, option exercises, tax withholding and trades on preset plans. AI monitors are changing what the alert contains by reading each filing against a rule written in plain English. Our pick is AyeWatch, which sends the open-market buy you asked about and skips the payroll.

The phrase means two things

People who type "insider trading alerts" usually want a ping when executives buy their own company's stock. In law the same words describe a crime: trading on material nonpublic information, which is what SEC Rule 10b5-1 deals with. A public alert can only cover the first meaning. AyeWatch's own guide to insider trading alerts is blunt about it: it has no inside information, sells none, and a summary of a public form is not a tip.

Why plain filing alerts flood your phone

Directors, officers and holders of more than 10% of a company's stock report most trades on Form 4, before the end of the second business day after the trade. One form can hold several lines, each with a one-letter code. P is an open market or private purchase. A is a grant, M an option exercise, F shares withheld for tax, G a gift. Since April 2023 there is also a checkbox for trades under a Rule 10b5-1 plan, and gifts that could once wait for the annual Form 5 now go on Form 4.

EDGAR's own feeds sort by form type, not by code. Ask its Latest Filings page for form 4 with ownership filings only and you get every Form 4, from every company, newest first. A keyword alert on "purchase" does no better, because the code, the role and the 10b5-1 box sit in separate fields of the same form. Getting from that stream to "the CFO bought with her own money" means reading each filing.

What an AI filter changes

That reading is the part language models are good at. With AyeWatch you write the rule as a sentence:

Open-market purchases by the CEO, CFO or directors of these eight companies, over $250,000. Ignore grants, option exercises, gifts and 10b5-1 trades.

AyeWatch lists semantic AI alerts, not keyword matching, on its pricing page, and each alert arrives with a short summary and links to its sources. Push and the in-app feed come with every plan, and paid plans, from $9 a month, add email, Slack, Discord and webhooks. It is not the only monitor that judges what matters in a change, and it is not a screener: it has no market-wide tables and no trade database of its own.

Where the model can still be wrong

An AI summary is a reading, and readings miss things. Amendments, footnotes and derivative lines can change what a filing means. Even the SEC, describing its own insider transaction data sets, says they are no substitute for the filings and that investors should read the full filings before any investment decision. Treat the alert as a pointer and open the Form 4 it links. Nothing in an alert, or in this article, is investment advice.

If you would rather build your own

The data is free. EDGAR serves a Latest Filings Atom feed and JSON on data.sec.gov, and each Form 4 comes with its own XML file, so an agent can parse the codes directly. The SEC asks automated clients to keep to 10 requests a second or fewer and to declare a User-Agent with a contact email. If you would rather write a sentence than a parser, an AI monitor does that work for you; if you enjoy the parsing, EDGAR has everything you need.