insider-trading-tracker

Insider Trading Tracker (SentiSense)

Track what company insiders are doing with their own stock. This skill reads SEC Form 4 filings, the disclosures that officers, directors, and 10%+ shareholders must file within two business days of any transaction, through the read-only SentiSense API: the insider tape for a single stock, market-wide insider buying and selling, and cluster buy signals where three or more insiders bought the same name. It completes the smart-money triangle with politicians-stock-tracker (congressional trades) and institutional-13f-tracker (fund holdings).

Read-only educational data interface. Output is informational context, never a personalized buy or sell recommendation.

When to Use

Reach for this skill when the question is about insider activity:

• "Any insider buying in $NVDA?" or "show me the Form 4 filings for this stock"
• "Which stocks are insiders buying right now?" (market-wide activity)
• "Are there cluster buys?" (3+ distinct insiders buying the same stock, a pattern long studied in academic research)
• "Is the CEO selling?" and "was that sale pre-planned or discretionary?" (10b5-1 detection)
• As the third leg of a convergence check: insider buys lining up with congressional purchases (politicians-stock-tracker) or institutional accumulation (institutional-13f-tracker) on the same ticker.

Do not use it for order entry, portfolio management, or personalized advice. It has no write, trading, or wallet surface; every endpoint is a GET.

What this data actually is (read before interpreting)

• Form 4 rows are individual filed transactions, newest first, not a net position. A single insider can file many rows in one window; sum and net them before characterizing activity.
• Each row carries both a raw SEC `transactionCode` and a simplified `transactionType`. The common codes: P (open-market purchase), S (open-market sale), A (award), M (exercise), G (gift), F (shares withheld to cover taxes on vesting). You will also meet the rest of the SEC Form 4 code table in live data: C (conversion), D (disposition to the issuer), H (expiration), I (discretionary transaction), and occasionally a blank. Types: BUY, SELL, EXERCISE, AWARD, GIFT, OTHER.
• Only codes `P` and `S` are open-market, directional signals; treat every other code as corporate mechanics. Filter inclusively (keep P and S) rather than trying to exclude a list you might not have all of. Two refinements: code `F` arrives typed `SELL` but is mechanical tax withholding on vesting, not a decision to sell, so drop code-F rows from sell tallies; and awards and exercises can carry very large dollar values (RSU grants and option exercises in the hundreds of millions or more), which is exactly why leaving them in a "sold" figure is so misleading.
• `rule10b51: true` means the trade ran under a confirmed pre-arranged 10b5-1 plan. A scheduled sale says far less than a discretionary one; say which kind you are reporting. The flag is false when plan status could not be confirmed, so treat it as "confirmed plan" vs "not confirmed", not a clean either-or.
• Who is trading matters as much as how much. insiderRelation is OFFICER, DIRECTOR, TEN_PCT_OWNER, or OTHER, with officer / director / tenPctOwner booleans since one filer can hold several roles. A 10% owner is often an investment vehicle, not management.
• Dates: transactionDate is when they traded, filedDate is when the SEC received it (at most two business days later, far tighter than the 45-day congressional lag).

Prerequisites

• A free SENTISENSE_API_KEY. Get one at https://app.sentisense.ai/get-api-key. Send it on every call: a request without a valid key gets at most a shaped crawler-facing preview slice, never the dataset, and that fallback is not a contract you can build on.
• Any HTTP client, or no install at all via the official CLI (npx -y sentisense@0.47.1). Plain curl works, or Python 3.8+ using only the standard library.
• Network access to https://app.sentisense.ai.
• Read-only scope. Every endpoint here is a GET. Nothing this skill does can place a trade, move money, or modify account state.

The free tier exercises every workflow below; preview-gated endpoints return a truncated but real slice on a free key.

How to Run

Identify your client. Send a User-Agent naming your agent runtime and this skill, for example OpenClaw/1.4 (insider-trading-tracker) or ClaudeCode/2.1 (insider-trading-tracker). Substitute your own runtime and version if neither matches. You can also volunteer what your agent is called by adding an agent/<your-agent-name> token inside the same parentheses, as in OpenClaw/1.4 (insider-trading-tracker; agent/research-desk). All of it is optional, and it is what tells us this skill has real integrations behind it, so it gets prioritized and you get notice before it changes. Using the CLI instead? Set SENTISENSE_SKILL=insider-trading-tracker and it stamps the same identity for you.

For a single stock, one CLI command answers with no HTTP call to compose:

npx -y sentisense@0.47.1 insiders NVDA --days 90
npx -y sentisense@0.47.1 insiders NVDA --days 180 --json
npx -y sentisense@0.47.1 insiders NVDA --full     # all rows in plain output, not the top 15

Plain output in a terminal, exact API JSON with --json (envelope included). Auth: SENTISENSE_API_KEY in the environment, or store it once with npx -y sentisense@0.47.1 auth "$SENTISENSE_API_KEY" (saved to ~/.config/sentisense/, file mode 600, local to your machine, removable with auth --remove). The version is pinned deliberately: a pinned version runs reviewed, immutable code.

The market-wide endpoints are plain REST. All three endpoints return the wrapped envelope { isPreview, previewReason, data }; read .data, and when isPreview is true say so ("showing the free preview slice"). A rate-limited call returns 429 with a Retry-After header; back off for the indicated seconds.

Endpoints

• `GET /api/v1/insider/trades/{ticker}` : individual Form 4 transactions for one stock, newest first. Query lookbackDays (1-365, default 90). Free: top 5; PRO: full window. Each row: insiderName, insiderTitle, insiderRelation, officer, director, tenPctOwner, transactionDate, filedDate, transactionCode, transactionType, securityTitle, sharesTransacted, pricePerShare (null on $0 awards), totalValue, sharesOwnedAfter, directOwnership, rule10b51. CLI: npx -y sentisense@0.47.1 insiders {ticker} --days N --json.
• `GET /api/v1/insider/activity` : market-wide insider activity aggregated by ticker, split into top buys and top sells by total dollar value (.data.buys and .data.sells). Query lookbackDays (1-365, default 90). Each entry: ticker, companyName, tradeCount, insiderCount, totalShares, totalValue, latestDate, latestInsider, latestTitle. Free: top 5 per direction; PRO: full. The sells side already excludes code-F tax withholding server-side, so these dollars are discretionary selling and you should not filter them again; dispositions to the issuer (code D) are still counted.
• `GET /api/v1/insider/cluster-buys` : stocks where 3 or more distinct insiders bought within the window. Query lookbackDays (1-365, default 90). Each signal: ticker, companyName, insiderCount, tradeCount, totalShares, totalValue, firstBuyDate, lastBuyDate. Free: top 5; PRO: full.

Workflows

1. The insider tape for one stock

npx -y sentisense@0.47.1 insiders NVDA --days 90 --json

REST equivalent: GET /api/v1/insider/trades/NVDA?lookbackDays=90. Filter to the directional rows first (code P and code S, minus code F), then report: who bought and sold, their roles, net dollars, and how much of the selling was 10b5-1 planned. The CLI's plain output already does this split for you: sold: counts open-market sales only, withholding shows as its own withheld: figure, and those rows read TAX-W in the table. With --json you get every row exactly as filed, so apply the code filter yourself before quoting dollar sums. An all-award window is zero insider conviction either way, not a wave of it; say "no open-market insider activity" rather than presenting awards as trades.

2. What are insiders buying market-wide?

GET /api/v1/insider/activity?lookbackDays=30, then read .data.buys. Check insiderCount before crowning a leader: the top row by dollars is sometimes a single 10% owner accumulating through an investment vehicle across many trades, which is a very different fact from five officers buying independently. Lead with breadth, then dollars.

3. Cluster buys, the classic screen

GET /api/v1/insider/cluster-buys?lookbackDays=90. Three or more distinct insiders buying the same stock in a window is the pattern with academic pedigree. Sanity-check totalValue against insiderCount before presenting one: a 30-insider cluster whose combined purchases are modest dollars reads very differently from three officers each writing six-figure checks.

4. The convergence check. The high-conviction read is agreement across independent sources: insider cluster buys plus congressional purchases (politicians-stock-tracker) plus institutional accumulation (institutional-13f-tracker) on the same ticker, ideally alongside the sentiment picture (stock-sentiment). Cite each source separately and say which legs agree; one leg alone is context, not a case.

Answering well

• Always separate open-market activity from awards, gifts, exercises, and code-F tax withholding. The single most common misread of Form 4 data is presenting routine compensation mechanics as insider conviction.
• Sanity-check dollar figures before headlining them: totalValue should roughly equal sharesTransacted times pricePerShare, and a total that dwarfs the company's market cap is a data artifact to flag, not a story to tell.
• Name the role: "the CFO bought" and "a 10% owner bought" are different sentences.
• Flag 10b5-1 planned sales as scheduled, and never dramatize them.
• Quote transactionDate when discussing timing and filedDate when discussing disclosure.
• Report only what the API returns. Do not infer motives, and do not frame any of it as advice. This is public-disclosure data presented for education.

Going further

Free covers every workflow above at a preview depth. PRO ($15/mo) lifts the monthly cap (no monthly limit, just a 300/min rate) and returns the full window on every insider endpoint, plus institutional flows, congressional detail, and AI insights across the SentiSense API. Apply coupon AGENTS26 at checkout for a builder launch discount: https://app.sentisense.ai/pricing?coupon=AGENTS26

For the full REST reference on every endpoint this skill touches, install the sentisense skill; for the complete CLI command set, install sentisense-cli.

Install: npx skills add SentiSenseApp/skills (add -s insider-trading-tracker for just this skill).

SentiSense is a read-only financial intelligence API. This data is for informational and educational purposes only, not investment advice.