Form4API MCP — SEC Form 4 Insider Trading
About
Query real-time SEC Form 4 insider trading data from Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, and Zed via natural language. 9 tools, free tier, amendment-aware
Details
- Author
- theodor90
- Downloads
- 395
- Categories
- Finance, AI
Jump to
- Real-time SEC EDGAR data (10‑minute poll cycle)
- Amendment‑aware — correctly handles Form 4/A filings
- 10b5‑1 plan detection for discretionary vs pre‑scheduled trades
- Cluster signals for 3+ insiders buying/selling within 5‑day window
- Plan‑aware error messages (free users get clear upgrade prompt)
- 100% public data sourced from SEC EDGAR
Setting up with Highlight
This MCP is not yet compatible with Highlight’s one-click setup. However, you can still use it with Highlight by following these steps:
- Download and install Highlight from highlightai.com/download
- Navigate to the plugins tab and select "Add Custom Plugin"
-
Configure the plugin with the settings below
Plugin Name
Form4API MCP — SEC Form 4 Insider TradingCommand (node, npx, python, etc.)Please refer to the README for specific instructions on how to obtain API keys or other required environment variables.
- Enable "Start Automatically" if you want the plugin to start when Highlight launches
From the repository
Get a free API key at form4api.com/dashboard, add the server configuration with the FORM4API_KEY environment variable, and restart your MCP client. The 9 tools appear automatically.
get_transactions
Search SEC Form 4 insider transactions with rich filters: ticker, insider CIK, transaction code/category, date range, a dollar floor (min_value), institutional-ownership trend, and (Pro+) upper trade-size bounds plus post-trade return screening (1d/1w/1m/3m/6m, returns as fractions e.g. 0.05 = +5%). Returns transaction-level rows — shares, price, total value, transaction code, 10b5-1 flag, insider role flags. Use this for filtered or historical search across many companies/insiders; use get_recent_filings for an unfiltered live feed instead, or get_insider_transactions/get_company_insiders when you already have a specific insider or company. Free plan, including min_value; max_value/min_shares/max_shares/min_return_*/max_return_*/has_returns require Pro. Paginated, max 100/page, and paging depth is plan-limited (Free 20 pages, Starter 100, Pro+ unlimited) — for a bulk pull use the REST endpoint GET /v1/transactions/export (Business) instead of paging.
get_recent_filings
Live feed of the newest SEC Form 4 filings, sorted most-recent-first, optionally filtered to one ticker. New filings typically appear within ~60 seconds of SEC publication. Use this to check "what just happened" rather than get_transactions (built for filtered/historical search across date ranges and codes). Returns per-filing accession number, filed/period-of-report dates, company + insider identity, and transaction count; pass the accession number to get_filing for full detail. Free plan. Paginated, max 100/page.
get_filing
Fetch one Form 4 filing by its exact SEC accession number (format NNNNNNNNNN-YY-NNNNNN, e.g. 0000320193-26-000001). Use this once you already have an accession number from get_recent_filings or get_transactions. Returns filed/period-of-report dates, company and insider identity, and transaction count for that filing. Free plan.
get_insider_profile
Look up one insider's identity by CIK (SEC's numeric filer identifier, e.g. 0001214128) — returns name, all known titles, and director/officer/10%-owner role flags. If you only have a name, resolve it to a CIK first with the generated search_insiders tool. For trading history use get_insider_transactions or get_insider_career_summary instead. Free plan.
get_insider_transactions
All Form 4 transactions filed by one insider (by CIK), filterable by ticker, transaction code, date range, and 10b5-1 exclusion. Use this once you have an insider's CIK on hand; get_transactions with insider_cik= gives the same rows alongside its broader filter set, while get_insider_career_summary returns a pre-aggregated rollup instead of raw rows. Free plan. Paginated, max 100/page.
get_company_overview
Company profile for a single ticker — name, CIK, SIC sector/description, state of incorporation, website, total Form 4 filing count, and active insider count. Use this for company identity/metadata; use get_company_insiders to list who is filing, or get_transactions with ticker= for their trade history. Free plan.
get_company_insiders
Full roster of insiders who have ever filed a Form 4 for a given ticker — name, CIK, titles, director/officer/10%-owner flags, last-filed date, and total transaction count per insider. Use this to enumerate a company's insiders (e.g. before pulling each one's career summary); use get_transactions with ticker= for the underlying trade history itself. Free plan. Paginated, max 100/page.
get_signals
Cluster buy/sell signals — multiple insiders at the same company trading in the same direction within a short window, a stronger conviction signal than any single trade. Excludes 10b5-1 plan trades automatically by construction. Returns signal type, detection date, buyer/seller counts, total $ value, and the underlying transactions; pair with the generated explain_signal tool to see exactly why a given signal fired. Use get_transactions instead for raw, unaggregated trade search. Requires Business plan (a 402 upgrade_required response is returned otherwise). Paginated, max 50/page.
get_form144
Form 144 notice-of-proposed-sale filings — insiders disclose intent to sell roughly 2 days before the matching Form 4 sale lands, so this is an early-warning signal, especially discretionary (non-10b5-1) notices. Filter by ticker, insider name (partial match), date range, or exclude_10b5. Cross-reference with get_transactions/get_insider_transactions to see whether the intent was actually executed. Requires Business plan. Paginated, max 100/page.
get_holdings
Institutional 13F-HR positions — filter by ticker (CUSIP resolved to ticker automatically), CUSIP, manager CIK, quarter, or minimum position value. Answers "who owns NVDA" or "which managers hold AAPL this quarter"; pair with get_managers to look up a manager's identity/AUM, or get_transactions to cross-reference insider activity at the same company. Requires Business plan. Paginated, max 100/page.
get_managers
Browse the institutional manager index — each manager with their latest 13F-HR filing date and AUM. Filter by name (partial match — "Berkshire" returns Berkshire Hathaway) or minimum AUM. Pair with get_holdings to see what a given manager owns. Requires Business plan. Paginated, max 100/page.
get_sentiment
Monthly insider-sentiment score for a ticker (MSPR-style, -100 to +100; positive = net buying conviction), one point per month, defaulting to roughly the last 12 months. Automatically excludes 10b5-1 plan trades so the score reflects discretionary conviction, not pre-scheduled dispositions. Use get_transactions or get_signals for the trade-level detail behind a given month. Requires Business plan.
get_insider_career_summary
Aggregate career rollup for one insider by CIK — first/last transaction dates, total shares/value bought vs sold, top companies traded, transaction-code breakdown, 10b5-1 plan split, and average post-trade returns (stored as fractions, e.g. 0.05 = +5%). Use this instead of get_insider_transactions when you want a pre-computed summary rather than raw rows; pair with the generated get_insider_scorecard for hit-rate statistics on their discretionary buys specifically. Requires Pro plan.
check_usage
Snapshot of the authenticated API key's current usage — plan name, requests made today, daily limit, and all-time request count. Use this for a quick right-now check; use the generated get_usage_history tool for a daily trend over time, or get_key_activity for a per-request log. Free plan, works on every tier.
verify_setup
Diagnostic check: confirms FORM4API_KEY is present and valid, the backend is reachable, and reports your current plan — returns a pass/fail/warn per check plus concrete next steps (where to get a key, how to upgrade) instead of a raw error. Run this first whenever another tool fails or returns a 401/402, to isolate whether the problem is configuration, plan, or a backend outage. No API key or parameters required.
research_company
Bundled insider-research context for one ticker in a single call — company profile, recent insider transactions (10b5-1 flagged), cluster buy/sell signals, monthly sentiment score, and a computed net buy/sell direction summary. Use this FIRST for any company insider-research question; it replaces 4 separate calls (get_company_overview, get_transactions, get_signals, get_sentiment) and degrades gracefully — if signals/sentiment require a plan you don't have, they come back null with an explanatory `_unavailable` note instead of failing the whole call. Company/transaction data works on Free; signals/sentiment sections require Business. Fetches all sections concurrently. Research and decision-support only, not investment advice.
explain_signal
Explain why a signal fired: the insiders and trades counted, what was excluded, and the criteria (Business plan+). Reconstructs the full evidence behind one company's insider signal from GET /v1/signals: the detection criteria (5-day cluster window, 3-insider threshold, 90-day ratio window, 10b5-1 exclusion), the list of cluster buyers and sellers (each with their role and individual trades in the window), trades that were excluded from the cluster count and why (10b5-1 plan or superseded by amendment), and the raw buy/sell share totals behind the 90-day ratio. Use this to audit or debug a specific signal rather than to scan many companies (use GET /v1/signals for that). This is a LIVE reconstruction from current non-superseded data, computed on every request (no caching) — it can differ slightly from the originally stored signal if trades were amended afterward. Requires Business plan or higher (402 PLAN_REQUIRED on Free/Starter/Pro). Returns 404 COMPANY_NOT_FOUND if the ticker isn't tracked, 404 SIGNAL_NOT_FOUND if no signal exists for the given/most-recent date, or 400 INVALID_DATE if `date` isn't YYYY-MM-DD.
get_congress_politician
Get one politician's congressional trading profile (Pro plan+). Returns one politician's profile — identity fields, total/buy/sell trade counts, most recent trade's disclosure date, their top N most-traded tickers (by trade count), and their N most recent trades (same shape as GET /v1/congress/trades). Use this for a one-call politician overview rather than paging /v1/congress/trades?politician= yourself. Accepts either a bioguide ID (e.g. "P000197") or the politician's URL slug (e.g. "nancy-pelosi") in the path, matched case-insensitively against whichever field applies. Returns 404 NOT_FOUND if neither matches. Requires Pro plan or higher (402 PLAN_REQUIRED on Free/Starter). Query runs live — no caching.
get_congress_ticker_rollup
Which politicians traded a ticker, with net buy/sell counts (Pro plan+). Returns every politician who has a non-superseded congressional trade in the given ticker, each with their trade/buy/sell counts, plus ticker-level totals. Optional window_days restricts to trades with a transactionDate in the trailing N days; omit for all-time. A ticker with no congress trades returns 200 with an empty politicians array and zero counts rather than 404 — there is no separate ticker/company entity in this dataset to 404 against. Requires Pro plan or higher (402 PLAN_REQUIRED on Free/Starter). Query runs live — no caching.
get_convergence_signals
Insider cluster-buy x congressional-purchase convergence (Pro plan+). Returns the tickers where an insider cluster-buy (InsiderSignal.IsClusterBuy) and at least one non-superseded congressional PURCHASE happened within window_days of EACH OTHER, restricted to convergences where the MORE RECENT of the pair's two dates is within a trailing lookback_days (so this surfaces CURRENT convergences, not ancient history). DEFINITION: for each result, insider.signalDate is the SignalDate of the qualifying cluster-buy signal with the most recent date (insider.insiderCount is that same signal's count — never summed or maxed across multiple signals), and congress is every non-superseded congressional purchase that paired with at least one qualifying cluster-buy (not every purchase in the window — only the ones that actually paired). firstSeen/lastSeen are the earliest/most recent dates among all qualifying insider and congress dates for that ticker. STRENGTH is documented arithmetic, NOT a black-box or predictive/ML score: strength = (distinct congressional purchasers among the qualifying legs) x (the representative signal's insiderCount) — a plain multiplication of two observed counts, nothing more. HONESTY: every congress leg always carries both amountLow and amountHigh (STOCK Act discloses ranges, never exact figures — never combined into a fabricated midpoint) and disclosureLagDays = (disclosureDate - transactionDate); congressional trades are disclosed up to 45 days after the actual trade under the STOCK Act, so this endpoint is detection/monitoring of what insiders AND members of Congress have DISCLOSED buying, not a claim of predictive edge, alpha, or win rate — no performance numbers are computed or implied anywhere in this response. window_days and lookback_days are both caller-overridable with clamps (see each parameter's own description for the exact bounds). Requires Pro plan or higher (402 PLAN_REQUIRED on Free/Starter). Query runs live against the database — no caching.
get_data_quality
Public data-quality, freshness and coverage metrics for the whole dataset. Returns public, keyless metrics on data freshness, ingestion latency, corpus coverage, and post-trade returns coverage — use this to check whether the dataset is current before relying on it (e.g. confirm Form 4 ingestion isn't stalled, or that price data isn't stale), not to look up any single company, insider, or transaction. Includes: most recent Form 4 processed timestamp and median/p95 filing-accepted-to-processed latency in seconds, latest price-bar date and how many days behind it is, total companies/transactions tracked plus filing counts by form type (4, 144, 13F-HR), the percentage of 13F CUSIPs resolved to a ticker, and the percentage of eligible transactions with fully computed post-trade returns. Takes no parameters. Cached for 30 minutes; no API key or plan required.
get_insider_leaderboard
Ranked leaderboard of insiders by buy track-record (Business plan+). Returns the top insiders ranked by historical buy performance — same scored-buy methodology as GET /v1/insiders/{cik}/scorecard, applied across the whole corpus rather than one insider. Use this to discover which insiders have the best track record; use the per-insider scorecard once you have a specific CIK. Scores use absolute return (NOT market-adjusted) — a hit is a scored buy with a positive 3m (or 6m) return anchored at the filing-date close. Only discretionary open-market buys (P-code, not 10b5-1, not derivative) with a matured return are counted. Insiders with fewer than min_trades (floor 5) scored buys are excluded. Requires Business plan or higher (402 PLAN_REQUIRED on Free/Starter/Pro). Results are cached for 1 hour per unique parameter combination.
get_insider_scorecard
Get insider buy track-record scorecard (Pro plan+). Returns the historical hit rate and average/median return of an insider's discretionary open-market buys (TransactionCode=P, excluding 10b5-1 plans and derivatives), plus their best and worst scored buy. Scores use absolute return (NOT market-adjusted) anchored at the filing-date close. A 'hit' is a scored buy whose 3m (or 6m) return is positive. Use this over GET /v1/insiders/{cik}/summary when you specifically want a scored track record (with a sample-sufficiency guard) rather than raw totals; use GET /v1/insiders/leaderboard (Business+) to rank many insiders by this same methodology. Score fields (hitRate3m, avgReturn3m, etc.) are null when the insider has fewer than 5 matured scored buys (sampleSufficient=false), preventing misleading statistics from small samples. Requires Pro plan or higher (402 PLAN_REQUIRED on Free/Starter). Returns 404 NOT_FOUND if the CIK isn't tracked. Computed live — no caching. Note: all return fields (HitRate3m, AvgReturn3m, MedianReturn3m, etc.) are stored as FRACTIONS — 0.05 means +5%, -0.10 means -10%.
get_key_activity
Recent, per-request API activity log for the authenticated key. Returns the most recent HTTP requests made with the authenticated API key, most recent first, including the endpoint path, response status code, duration in milliseconds, and timestamp. Use this to debug integration issues — confirm a specific call reached the API, check for repeated 4xx/5xx responses, or spot slow requests — rather than for usage trends; for aggregate daily counts use GET /v1/keys/usage/history instead. Requires a valid X-Api-Key (401 without one).
get_public_stats
Public corpus-wide statistics — no API key required. Returns headline dataset totals: filing count, transaction count, tracked companies, institutional holdings rows, Form 144 and Form 13F-HR filing counts, the earliest filing date in the corpus, the most recent quarter's total 13F-HR reported AUM in USD, and measured ingestion latency (median/p95 seconds from SEC acceptance to our processing, trailing 7 days). Use this for corpus-wide totals (e.g. a marketing/status widget), not for per-company or per-insider data — those live under GET /v1/companies and GET /v1/insiders. For freshness and coverage-quality metrics (is ingestion stalled, is price data stale) use GET /v1/data-quality instead. Takes no parameters. No API key or plan required. Cached for ~12 hours.
get_status_history
Measured uptime history for the public status page — trailing 90-day daily breakdown. Returns a daily breakdown of measured API uptime over a trailing 90-day window, computed from an internal heartbeat probe that runs every 5 minutes and performs the same DB-connectivity check as GET /health/ready. Each day in the `days` array reports the number of 5-minute slots expected to have elapsed (288 for a complete past day, pro-rated for the feature's first day and for today's partial day), how many of those slots recorded a healthy heartbeat, and the resulting uptime percentage for that day — plus an overall percentage (`overallPct`) across the whole window. `start` is the earliest date included: either the date of the very first heartbeat ever recorded, or 89 days before today once more than 90 days of history exist. Days before that are never returned. Use this to render an uptime history / status bar; for live corpus freshness use GET /v1/data-quality instead. Takes no parameters. Cached for ~5 minutes; no API key or plan required.
get_usage_history
Daily request counts for the authenticated key over a trailing window. Returns a daily time series of request counts for the authenticated API key over the trailing N days — one data point per calendar day (UTC). Use this to plot usage trends or check rate-limit headroom over time. For a single current-day snapshot (today's count, plan limit, reset time) use GET /v1/keys/usage instead; for a raw request-by-request log use GET /v1/keys/usage/activity. Requires a valid X-Api-Key (401 without one).
get_webhook_events
Replay webhook delivery events since a given timestamp (default: last 24h). Returns up to 500 delivery attempts across all of the authenticated key's subscriptions since `since` (default: last 24 hours), most recent first — delivery id, subscription id, event type, attempt count, delivered-at/next-retry-at timestamps, last HTTP status code from the receiving endpoint, whether the delivery is dead (exhausted all retries), and the event payload. Use this to reconcile missed webhook deliveries (e.g. after an outage on your receiving endpoint) rather than relying solely on push delivery. `since` cannot be more than 30 days in the past. Requires a valid X-Api-Key (401 without one). `payload` is null and `payloadRedacted` is true for any event type above your current plan (congress.trade.filed requires Starter, signal.convergence requires Pro) — delivery history outlives the plan that created it, so payloads are checked against the plan you are on now, not the plan you had when you subscribed.
health_ingestion
Ingestion-death detector — Form 4 freshness, parse-queue health, price-feed freshness. Returns live (uncached) ingestion health: Form 4 processing freshness (stale after 90 minutes during the weekday 06:00-22:00 US Eastern EDGAR activity window, 14 hours outside it), parse-queue health (stale when >50 jobs are pending AND the oldest has waited >45 minutes), and daily price-feed freshness (degraded, never stale, when price bars are >5 days behind). Overall status is "healthy", "degraded" (price feed only), or "stale" (Form 4 or queue). Returns HTTP 503 when stale, 200 otherwise — safe to point an external uptime monitor at directly. No API key or plan required.
list_companies
List companies with a public ticker, sorted by name or total filings. Returns a single page of companies that have a tracked public ticker — for browsing or building a company picker, not for searching by name or CIK (there is no full-text search here; use GET /v1/companies/{ticker} to fetch one company by its exact ticker). Each entry includes the company's CIK, name, ticker, exchange, total filing count, and distinct insider count. There is no page parameter — this endpoint always returns the top `limit` companies by the chosen sort order. Not plan-gated.
list_congress_politicians
Ranked rollup of politicians by congressional trade activity (Pro plan+). Returns a paginated list of politicians who have at least one non-superseded congressional trade, each with total/buy/sell counts (sells include both Sale and PartialSale; Exchange trades count only toward total) and their most recent trade's disclosure date. Ordered by total trade count descending, ties broken by most recently disclosed. Use this to discover active traders; for one politician's full profile (including their most-traded tickers and recent trades) use GET /v1/congress/politicians/{idOrSlug}. Requires Pro plan or higher (402 PLAN_REQUIRED on Free/Starter). Query runs live — no caching.
list_congress_trades
Query congressional STOCK Act trades (Free+, plan-clamped disclosure window). Returns a paginated JSON list of congressional periodic-transaction-report trades, most recently DISCLOSED first, with non-superseded rows only (amended-away rows never appear). COVERAGE — HOUSE ONLY TODAY: every trade in this dataset comes from the U.S. House Clerk's PTR index. Senate eFD (efdsearch.senate.gov) returns 403 to datacenter traffic, so no Senate filings are ingested yet. chamber=Senate remains a valid filter but matches nothing and returns the response header X-Coverage-Note: chamber-not-covered, so an empty result is never ambiguous. Scanning by chamber should treat that header as "not covered", not as "no trades". PLAN-CLAMPED WINDOW: this endpoint is open to every plan, but how far back you can see is clamped on disclosureDate — Free sees only trades disclosed in the last 30 days, Starter the last 366 days, Pro/Business/Enterprise unlimited history. Passing an older disclosure_date_from than your plan allows does not extend the window — the floor always wins. Filters: ticker, politician (bioguideId, exact), party (free-text, case-insensitive exact match — not a fixed enum), chamber (House|Senate — see the coverage note above), state (2-letter code), transaction_type (purchase|sale|partial_sale|exchange), min_amount (range-aware — matches AmountLow >= value, never a fabricated midpoint), transaction_date_from/to, disclosure_date_from/to. Every row always carries BOTH amountLow and amountHigh (STOCK Act discloses ranges, never exact figures) and disclosureLagDays = (disclosureDate - transactionDate) — the STOCK Act allows up to 45 days of lag, so "real-time" here means minutes-after-disclosure, not minutes-after-trade. For per-politician or per-ticker rollups use GET /v1/congress/politicians, /v1/congress/politicians/{idOrSlug}, or /v1/congress/tickers/{ticker} (all Pro+). Query runs live against the database — no caching.
list_filings
List Form 4 filings with optional ticker, CIK and date filters. Returns a paginated list of Form 4 filings, newest filed first. Filter by ticker, cik, and a from/to filed-date window. Each entry carries the accession number, company ticker/name, period of report, filed date, amendment type (Original/Amendment), and the count of non-superseded transactions in that filing. Use this for a company's filing HISTORY; use GET /v1/filings/recent for a live newest-first feed (it has no page parameter), and GET /v1/transactions when you want the individual trades rather than the filings that contain them. `limit` is accepted as an alias for `per_page`. Not plan-gated.
list_webhooks
List webhook subscriptions owned by the authenticated API key. Returns every webhook subscription (active and deactivated) created under the authenticated API key: subscription id, target URL, subscribed event types, creation date, active flag, and the isReadOnly flag. Does NOT return the signing secret again (it's shown once, at creation, by POST /v1/webhooks) — regenerate by deleting and recreating the subscription if it's lost. Requires a valid X-Api-Key (401 without one).
search_insiders
Search insiders (officers, directors, 10% owners) by name. Searches insiders by name and returns a paginated list of matches with each insider's CIK, title, director/officer/10%-owner flags, and total filing count. Use this to resolve a person's name to their CIK before fetching their transaction history, career summary, or scorecard — the CIK returned here feeds directly into GET /v1/insiders/{cik}/transactions, /summary, and /scorecard. Omitting the name filter returns insiders in alphabetical order rather than performing a search. Not plan-gated — available on the Free tier.
Claude Desktop / Cursor
Paste into your MCP client config file to install this server.
{
"mcpServers": {
"form4api mcp \u2014 sec form 4 insider trading": {
"form4api": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"-y",
"form4api-mcp"
],
"env": {
"FORM4API_KEY": "fapi_live_your_key_here"
}
}
}
}
}McpServers
{
"form4api": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"-y",
"form4api-mcp"
],
"env": {
"FORM4API_KEY": "fapi_live_your_key_here"
}
}
}Real-time SEC Form 4 insider trading data for Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, and VS Code. 23 tools covering insider transactions, cluster signals, sentiment, Form 144 intent-to-sell, and 13F-HR institutional holdings - amendment-aware, 10b5-1 clean, free tier available.
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