We Spent Months Cleaning SEC EDGAR 13F Data So You Don't Have To

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.

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: BlackRock, Inc. and BlackRock Inc. are 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 .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?" 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: npx alphasmo stocks flows --limit 8 That returns stocks ranked by net institutional buy/sell flow for the quarter — piped or scripted, it comes back as JSON automatically: { "ticker": "BRK-A", "issuer name": "BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC-CL A", "net value change usd": 255068024828, "avg weight pct": 1.42, "institution count": 1418 } The flagship signal is smart money convergence — tickers where 13F institutions and company insiders Form 4 filers are both buying at the same time: npx alphasmo convergence --limit 5 --format table ┌────────┬─────────────────────┬────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────┬────────────┐ │ ticker │ issuer │ confidence │ unique buyers │ cluster alert │ last buy │ ├────────┼─────────────────────┼────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼────────────┤ │ KKR │ KKR & CO INC │ 80.48 │ 5 │ yes │ 2026-03-04 │ ├────────┼─────────────────────┼────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼────────────┤ │ ELV │ ELEVANCE HEALTH INC │ 70 │ 2 │ no │ 2026-07-17 │ ├────────┼─────────────────────┼────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼────────────┤ │ IP │ INTERNATIONAL PAPER │ 62.59 │ 3 │ yes │ 2026-03-12 │ └────────┴─────────────────────┴────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────┴────────────┘ Output format auto-detects context — a real table in your terminal, JSON when piped or spawned by a script or an AI agent. --csv gets you a spreadsheet-ready export directly: alphasmo insider trades AAPL --csv | column -s, -t The 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: claude mcp add alphasmo -- npx -y alphasmo@latest mcp Tools exposed: search institutions , get institution profile , get institution holdings , get stock overview , get stock flows , get insider activity , get smart money convergence . npm install -g alphasmo alphasmo --help Anonymous 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 . The raw data is public. We just did the annoying part first.