OpenInsider

What it is

OpenInsider is a web front end over SEC Form 4 — the filing an officer, director or ten-per-cent holder has to make when they trade their own company's stock. The domain was registered in August 2011 and the site has been free ever since, paid for by Google ads.

The screener is what it does better than anything else free: ticker and insider-name boxes, share-price, value and change-in-holding ranges, separate filing-date and trade-date windows with eleven presets each plus custom ranges, a filing-delay filter, ten SIC sector groups over a three-level industry tree, ten transaction-type checkboxes from plain purchase and sale through gift, tax withholding and option exercise, and eleven insider-title checkboxes from CEO down to ten-per-cent owner. Results group by filing or company and sort by filing date, trade date, ticker or value.

The named screens in the navigation are that same form with parameters pre-set — cluster buys, penny-stock buys, purchases over 25k, sales over 100k, officer and CEO/CFO variants, and top purchases and sales by day, week and month. "Top" is a sort by dollar value over a window and nothing more; no score, rating or commentary is attached to any row.

Pricing

Free, with nothing to buy at any price. No account, no paid tier, no trial, no donation ask.

The money comes from Google AdSense, which matters for what it implies rather than what it costs: there are no customers, so there is nobody the operator owes an uptime promise to.

Data & coverage

US-registered issuers only, which is what Form 4 covers — no foreign filings, no congressional disclosures, no 13F holdings.

The lag is the headline. Polling EDGAR's current-filings feed and the site together on 14 September 2026, a Form 4 accepted at 12.11.05 ET appeared on the latest-filings page 85 seconds later — the page is a static file rebuilt roughly once a minute, which is what bounds the delay. The footer gives the processing window as 6:00-22:00 ET on weekdays except federal holidays, so nothing lands overnight or at the weekend. That is still the sharp difference from the congressional-disclosure sites this gets shelved beside — Form 4 is due within two business days, where a STOCK Act report can be six weeks late.

History runs back to 28 July 2003, eight years before the domain existed: filing-date queries return rows from that day onward and nothing before it.

Beyond the usual Form 4 fields, a row carries a flag column for amendments, derivative transactions, suspected errors and multi-transaction filings collapsed to a weighted average. The 1d, 1w, 1m and 6m post-filing price-change columns are headers only — empty on every row sampled, including filings from 2024. There are no live quotes anywhere on the site.

Integrations

None. No API, no webhooks, no spreadsheet add-in, no MCP server, and no export control on any results page.

One undocumented exception, smaller than it sounds: the chart page pulls a tab-separated file named ps_data.csv with one row per day — purchase and sale counts and values — from 28 July 2003 to the present, refreshed each weekday evening around 22:03 ET. It is the aggregate series behind the chart, not the filings. Third-party scrapers of the HTML tables exist; none is official, and the terms below are worth reading before you run one.

Limitations

• Planned sales are invisible. Form 4 has carried a mandatory Rule 10b5-1 checkbox since April 2023, and the filing XML exposes it as aff10b5One. OpenInsider drops it — the string 10b5 appears nowhere on the site, as filter, column or legend entry. A CFO's automatic quarterly sale under a plan adopted a year ago and a discretionary dump the week before bad news therefore render as the same "S - Sale" row at the same value. The commonest misreading of insider data is the one this interface cannot help you avoid. Cluster buys, in fairness, are distinguished: there is a dedicated screen and a column counting insiders per company.
• The operator is anonymous. No name, no company, no email address — only a message form, a privacy-shielded WHOIS record listing a US registrant in Pennsylvania, and terms naming California law. A free site with nobody's name on it and no paying customers can change, break or vanish without notice.
• The terms forbid most of what people do with it. The licence grants "personal, non-commercial transitory viewing only" and bars copying, commercial use and mirroring; the same document disclaims accuracy and promises no updates. Scraping the tables into a research pipeline sits outside that grant, whatever the robots file permits.
• No HTTPS at all. Port 443 refuses the connection; the site is served over plain HTTP by Apache 2.4.41. Nothing here is secret, but browsers mark it insecure and some networks block it.
• No account means no persistence. No saved screens, no watchlists, no email alerts. Every query is a URL you have to keep yourself.

Alternatives

Quiver Quantitative is the one to reach for when the blocker is the missing API — the same Form 4 data plus congressional trades and 13F holdings, over REST and with a licence that expects programmatic use. Capitol Trades is the closest match in shape, free and account-free with no API, but it tracks congressional STOCK Act disclosures rather than corporate insiders, on a three-year window and a lag measured in weeks. Unusual Whales folds both kinds of disclosure into the options tape, and GuruFocus sets insider activity beside thirty years of financials. For the filings themselves, EDGAR is free and authoritative, and SEC EDGAR MCP puts an LLM in front of it. The rest of the category is at insider, 13F and congressional trade trackers.