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I measured the congressional version of this recently and the obvious follow-up was to run the same thing on corporate insiders, since the two groups face wildly different deadlines.
**Setup**
Every Form 4 transaction with a trade date between 1 January 2025 and 26 August 2026. 565,678 transactions after two cleanups: co-filer duplicates removed, where two related entities report the same economic trade twice, and amendments (4/A) excluded, since those are corrections filed later by design and would unfairly inflate the tail.
Lag is filing date minus transaction date.
**One caveat before the numbers, because it changes how you read them.** The SEC deadline for a Form 4 is two *business* days. I am measuring *calendar* days, because that is what the filings actually give you. A Friday trade filed Tuesday is four calendar days and perfectly compliant. So treat the 2 day figure as a floor and the 4 day figure as the fairer compliance proxy.
**Results**
* Median lag: 2 days
* Mean: 3.53 days
* Within 2 calendar days: 65.9%
* Within 4 calendar days: 93.6%
* Within 7 calendar days: 97.7%
* More than 45 days: 0.82%, which is 4,632 filings
* Worst single lag: 546 days
**The comparison that made me run this**
Congress files under the STOCK Act with a 45 day window. Across 14,288 congressional transactions since January 2025, the median lag was 27 days and 6.4% still landed past the limit.
So corporate insiders, working to a deadline roughly twenty times tighter, blow it far less often. Under 1% of Form 4s take longer than the entire window Congress is handed.
**The tail**
Chronic late filers, minimum 25 filings, ranked by median lag:
* Sport City Cadiz S.L., 108 filings, median 127.5 days, 98% past 45 days
* Rhame Joseph Burns III, 35 filings, median 121 days, worst 279
* Leon Cooperman, 28 filings, median 104 days, 82% past 45 days
* Elwood Norris, 38 filings, median 90.5 days, worst 230
* Jeffrey Yu, 27 filings, median 84 days
* Goldman Sachs, filing under two separate entities, 49 and 54 filings, medians of 80 and 79.5 days
Two things jump out. Almost every chronic offender sits at a very small company, where there is probably nobody whose actual job is Section 16 compliance. The exception is Goldman Sachs, which is emphatically not that, and which appears twice.
**What I cannot tell you**
Whether any of them were ever fined. The SEC can and occasionally does pursue late Form 4 filers in sweeps, but enforcement outcomes are not in the filing data. Same wall I hit with the congressional numbers.
If anyone knows whether the late Form 4 penalty gets applied in practice, or has seen it happen, I would genuinely like to know.
No position in anything mentioned.