{"slug": "we-spent-months-cleaning-sec-edgar-13f-data-so-you-don-t-have-to", "title": "We Spent Months Cleaning SEC EDGAR 13F Data So You Don't Have To", "summary": "AlphaSMO released a free public API, CLI, and MCP server that cleans and normalizes SEC EDGAR 13F and Form 4 insider-trading data, solving the problem of near-duplicate institution names. The tool provides signals such as smart money convergence, where both institutional investors and company insiders are buying the same stocks, and outputs data in JSON, CSV, or table format.", "body_md": "SEC EDGAR is public, free, and a mess. Every quarter, 13,000+ institutional investment managers file Form 13F, disclosing their U.S. equity holdings. In theory that's a beautiful dataset — every hedge fund, every pension fund, every bank, all in one place. In practice, the raw filings actively fight you:\n\n`BlackRock, Inc.`\n\nand `BlackRock Inc.`\n\nare two distinct CIK registrations for what most people would call \"one\" institution. Multiply that across 13,000+ filers and you get a long tail of near-duplicate names that break any naive `GROUP BY institution_name`\n\n.None of this is exotic — it's the normal cost of working with real-world government filing data. But it's exactly the kind of unglamorous plumbing that eats a weekend project before you get to the interesting part: actually asking questions like *\"what is smart money buying right now?\"*\n\n[AlphaSMO](https://alphasmo.com/13f) is a free public API + CLI + MCP server sitting on top of all that cleaned-up 13F and Form 4 insider-trading data. No signup required to try it:\n\n```\nnpx alphasmo stocks flows --limit 8\n```\n\nThat returns stocks ranked by net institutional buy/sell flow for the quarter — piped or scripted, it comes back as JSON automatically:\n\n```\n[\n  {\n    \"ticker\": \"BRK-A\",\n    \"issuer_name\": \"BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC-CL A\",\n    \"net_value_change_usd\": 255068024828,\n    \"avg_weight_pct\": 1.42,\n    \"institution_count\": 1418\n  }\n]\n```\n\nThe flagship signal is **smart money convergence** — tickers where 13F institutions *and* company insiders (Form 4 filers) are both buying at the same time:\n\n```\nnpx alphasmo convergence --limit 5 --format table\n┌────────┬─────────────────────┬────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────┬────────────┐\n│ ticker │ issuer              │ confidence │ unique buyers │ cluster alert │ last buy   │\n├────────┼─────────────────────┼────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼────────────┤\n│ KKR    │ KKR & CO INC        │ 80.48      │ 5             │ yes           │ 2026-03-04 │\n├────────┼─────────────────────┼────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼────────────┤\n│ ELV    │ ELEVANCE HEALTH INC │ 70         │ 2             │ no            │ 2026-07-17 │\n├────────┼─────────────────────┼────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼────────────┤\n│ IP     │ INTERNATIONAL PAPER │ 62.59      │ 3             │ yes           │ 2026-03-12 │\n└────────┴─────────────────────┴────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────┴────────────┘\n```\n\nOutput format auto-detects context — a real table in your terminal, JSON when piped or spawned by a script or an AI agent. `--csv`\n\ngets you a spreadsheet-ready export directly:\n\n```\nalphasmo insider trades AAPL --csv | column -s, -t\n```\n\nThe same data ships as an [MCP server](https://modelcontextprotocol.io), so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible client can pull live 13F and insider data mid-conversation, without you writing a single integration line:\n\n```\nclaude mcp add alphasmo -- npx -y alphasmo@latest mcp\n```\n\nTools exposed: `search_institutions`\n\n, `get_institution_profile`\n\n, `get_institution_holdings`\n\n, `get_stock_overview`\n\n, `get_stock_flows`\n\n, `get_insider_activity`\n\n, `get_smart_money_convergence`\n\n.\n\n```\nnpm install -g alphasmo\nalphasmo --help\n```\n\nAnonymous requests work out of the box at a lower rate limit; a free API key ([alphasmo.com/developer](https://alphasmo.com/developer)) raises it. Full REST reference (curl-friendly, no CLI required) is at [alphasmo.com/developer/docs](https://alphasmo.com/developer/docs), and the same underlying data — institution profiles, holdings, quarter-over-quarter changes — is browsable directly at [alphasmo.com/13f](https://alphasmo.com/13f).\n\nThe raw data is public. We just did the annoying part first.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-spent-months-cleaning-sec-edgar-13f-data-so-you-don-t-have-to", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/james-alphasmo/we-spent-months-cleaning-sec-edgar-13f-data-so-you-dont-have-to-155k", "published_at": "2026-07-24 06:49:46+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-24 07:01:26.285343+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "ai-tools", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["AlphaSMO", "SEC EDGAR", "BlackRock", "KKR & CO INC", "ELEVANCE HEALTH INC", "INTERNATIONAL PAPER", "Claude", "ChatGPT"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-spent-months-cleaning-sec-edgar-13f-data-so-you-don-t-have-to", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-spent-months-cleaning-sec-edgar-13f-data-so-you-don-t-have-to.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-spent-months-cleaning-sec-edgar-13f-data-so-you-don-t-have-to.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-spent-months-cleaning-sec-edgar-13f-data-so-you-don-t-have-to.jsonld"}}