Form 4
The filing in which a company insider reports a change in their holdings, normally within two business days.
Updated 2026-07-26
Form 4 is the workhorse of insider disclosure. It reports a change — a purchase, a sale, a grant, an exercise, a gift — and states the date the change happened, the number of securities involved, the price where a price applies, and the holdings remaining afterwards.
The form has two tables. The first covers ordinary securities such as common stock. The second covers derivative securities: options, restricted units, warrants. A single filing routinely contains rows in both, and reading only the first table gives a systematically incomplete picture of what happened.
Every row carries a transaction code that says what kind of change it was. Treating all rows as "insider bought" or "insider sold" is the single most common way to misread the form: a grant and an open market purchase are both increases in holdings and mean entirely different things.
A Form 4 is normally due within two business days of the transaction, so the filing date is close to the transaction date but rarely identical. Both dates appear on every row we publish.
Related terms
7 entries- Disclosure lag
- The gap between the date something happened and the date it became public.
- Equity grant
- Shares or units an insider receives as compensation, reported under transaction code A rather than as a purchase.
- Form 3
- The first filing an insider makes, declaring what they already hold when they become an insider.
- Insider
- A person or entity whose relationship with a company obliges them to report their transactions in its securities.
- Open market purchase
- An insider buying shares on the market with their own money, reported under transaction code P.
- Option exercise
- Converting a derivative holding into shares, reported under transaction code M and often paired with a same-day sale.
- Transaction code
- The one or two letter code on each row of a Form 4 that says what kind of change occurred.