If you trade small-cap biotech, you know the pain: a stock gaps up 40% on Monday because of an 8-K filed Friday afternoon that you didn't see until Tuesday. So I built a manual weekend routine to catch these filings before they're priced in.
Every week, I scan 8-Ks, 10-Qs, and Form 4 insider filings for ~150 sub-$2B market cap biotechs. The signal is buried in language changes: a going-concern warning, a sudden insider sale above $50K, or a PDUFA date buried in a filing appendix.
Here's the exact process:
1. Pull EDGAR filings for the watchlist (a simple scraper surfaces new filings).
2. Read each 8-K for unusual language — restructuring, financing, or clinical hold mentions.
3. Cross-reference Form 4s for insider buys and sells above $50K. At these market caps, insider buys are often the strongest signal you'll get.
4. Compile a one-page digest with the top 3-5 flags.
The output is a weekly "Catalyst Watch" digest, timed to land before the market opens Monday. The free tier gets the catalyst calendar; paid subscribers get the insider flags and the filing analysis.
One thing worth being upfront about: this is manual, not automated. Judgment matters more than speed here — a scraper can tell you a filing exists, but it can't tell you that a reworded liquidity paragraph is a red flag.
The honest takeaway: the edge isn't access, it's attention. By the time a filing hits Twitter, the move is already done. Reading EDGAR directly is the only way to be early.