What a SEC catalyst scanner is supposed to do
A working SEC catalyst scanner has to do four things, in order: pull every catalyst-eligible form from EDGAR within minutes of filing, map the CIK to a tradeable ticker, score the catalyst against price/volume context, and put it in front of a human before the open. Most of the field gets steps one and two right and silently fails on three and four.
The form types that matter for an active catalyst trader are narrow and well-known: 8-K (Items 1.01, 2.02, 5.02, 7.01, 8.01), Form 4 (insider buys, especially CEO+CFO clusters), S-3 (shelf registrations that signal upcoming dilution risk), 13D/13G (activist positions), and 6-K (foreign private issuer disclosures ADR traders systematically miss). Everything else is noise.
If your scanner can't tell you which 8-K item just dropped — and show you the gap behavior on the same row — it's not a scanner. It's an RSS feed with a paywall.
FlyOnTheWall vs BamSEC vs Catalyst Edge — the side-by-side
FlyOnTheWall ($89/mo). Speed is real. Coverage of 8-Ks, analyst notes, syndicate calendar — solid. But the scoring is human-edited, the methodology is opaque, and there is no DCF or intrinsic-value rail underneath. You pay $89/month for a curated feed plus a Slack DM stream.
BamSEC ($49/mo). Best-in-class filing search and comparison UI. But it's a research tool — not a pre-market scanner. Zero pre-market scoring, no insider clustering, no short-squeeze filter. Great for a fundamental analyst, wrong tool for a day trader.
Catalyst Edge Scanner — free tier. Same EDGAR ingest. Public methodology page (/methodology/). Audited 89% hit rate. Top 3 picks free, every weekday. The Reader plan ($9/mo) opens the full list, the Pro plan ($39/mo) opens DCF intrinsic value and the JACKPOT convergence feed. No mid-tier $89 surcharge for the same data.
What the free tier covers (and the upgrade you only buy if it earns it)
Free tier: live /scanner/ top 3, /jackpot/ top 3, the 4 AM ET daily catalyst email, full /insiders/ Form 4 cluster rankings, /squeeze/ short-interest screener, and the audited /trust/ log. If that's all you ever use, the cost is zero, forever.
Reader ($9/mo): the full /scanner/ list, full /jackpot/, full daily email — same flow you'd pay $49/mo for at BamSEC. Pro ($39/mo): DCF intrinsic value, JACKPOT full table, Cerebro HUD macro overlays, alerts, full ticker lookup history. Same surface area Bloomberg charges $24,000/year for, priced like an indie developer tool.
We don't blur the data. The free tier is not a teaser. It's the actual scanner with a row cap. The way you upgrade is by hitting the cap and wanting the rows underneath — never because we hid something behind a fog filter.
How we built it for $0 of dependency creep
Catalyst Edge Scanner runs on Python stdlib, one Linux box, one cron table. Every CSV in the pipeline is rebuildable from the EDGAR public feed. No Snowflake, no DataDog, no Postgres-RDS-prod instance. The reason the free tier can stay free is that the marginal cost of a pageview is approximately the cost of a few ms of VM time.
We ship the methodology in public — every score, every weight, every cutoff has a published rule. /trust/ logs every catalyst pick going back 60+ days, win/loss outcomes included. /benchmarks/ compares us head-to-head against Bloomberg, FactSet, and Refinitiv on coverage and recall. None of the incumbents publish theirs.
If you're paying $89/month for FlyOnTheWall, the test is simple: give the free /scanner/ three weekdays of side-by-side. If our top 3 don't beat their headline feed on actionability, keep paying. If they do, cancel and route the savings back to your trading account.
How to use it on day one
Step 1: open /preview/ and drop your email. The 4 AM ET daily catalyst note is the highest-signal thing we send — calibrated for a pre-market read, never marketing.
Step 2: by 8 AM ET, open /scanner/ and look at the top 3. The catalyst form is on the row. The intraday gap behavior is on the row. The insider-cluster flag, when it fires, is on the row. Three rows is enough to size a watchlist.
Step 3: once you've watched the cap hit two days in a row, upgrade to Reader. $9 covers it. If you find yourself wanting fair-value math next to every ticker, /dcf/ is the Pro upgrade lead — and the DCF post walks the methodology in public.
Get the same picks our paying readers get — free
Top 3 of /scanner/ and /jackpot/, the audited /trust/ log, and the daily catalyst email. No drip campaigns, no upsell sequences — one note per trading day.