“Over 6,000 documents are filed with the SEC every day,” claims William Mitchell, founder of Gemfinder (www.gemfinder.com), one of a handful of advisory services that find trade opportunities among rights offerings, spinoffs, deregistrations and bankruptcies. Its Special Situations Discovery Tool (http://situations.gemfinder.com) sifts through EDGAR entries and posts promising candidates throughout the trading day—for a $29 monthly subscription.

LIKEWISE, GEMFINDER’S Spinoff & Reorg Profiles (www.spinoffprofiles.com) is a monthly e-mail newsletter that profiles value stocks for which a spinoff or bankruptcy has created an attractive entry point. Corporate divisions or product teams get spun off to better compete or unlock investor value, but their corporate structures afterward affects their investment potential. Sometimes, Mitchell prefers to invest in the corporate parent—Motorola Solutions in the recent split—and even finds hidden value in the fog that surrounds Chapter 11 reorganizations.

The newsletter, with at least one value investing recommendation and a calendar of upcoming spinoffs, costs $89 monthly. Of course, anyone can just go to the SEC Website and search it for free (www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml). Gemfinder will even show you how (www.spinoffprofiles.com/how-to-get-a-free-spinoff-list).

The challenge comes, though, after you’ve downloaded your Forms 4, 13G, 13D, 424B3 and S-1/A. The content of SEC documents is about as illuminating as the names they bear; and it takes the SEC 61 pages in “Descriptions of SEC Forms” (www. sec.gov/info/edgar/forms/edgform.pdf) just to explain what 15 single-spaced pages of form names mean. Your tax dollars at work. Mitchell’s monthly trade recommendations, on the other hand, have returned an average of 16% above the S&P 500 Index on an average annualized basis since the service’s June 2005 inception.

Catalyst Corner (http://www.catalystcorner.com), meanwhile, specializes in other kinds of situations—those that spawn pairs-trading opportunities. These could involve the FDA approval or rejection of a new drug, a defense contract or a new technology, says site founder Paul Rosenberg. It’s just about anything that affects a company’s cash or revenue flows and, thus, its stock price. Catalyst Corner provides free research reports on micro-caps in sectors like mining and energy that are, typically, fertile ground for such catalysts. But the key benefit of free Website registration is access to a tool—the same one used by Charter Partners, the New York City hedge fund that Rosenberg also founded—that lets visitors analyze pair trades themselves.

A pair trade is a mean-reversion strategy in which two related securities are purchased after a temporary divergence from their historical pricing norms. The trader shorts the stock that has advanced, while going long on the one that has lost ground. The expectation is that the prices of both will revert to the mean. Often, the combination includes an individual security like regional bank First Horizon National (FHN) and an ETF proxy for its sector, like Financial Select Sector SPDR (XLF). But another very interesting pair is Coca-Cola (KO) and PepsiCo (PEP), which, says Rosenberg, have been as much as four standard deviations from their statistical means lately. Again, you are looking for something out of the norm, and time is of the essence in pairs trading.

Catalyst Corner relies on the visitor to find an appropriate trading pair. But another pair-trading site that provides more hand-holding is Pairtrade Finder (www.pairtradefinder.com). It sells proprietary trading software for $497, including a free download and 30-day trial. The Pairtrade Finder subscription includes data downloads updated every five minutes with key metrics that suggest potential pair-trade opportunities. After ticker selection, the software steps the trader through the process, giving specific instructions on what to buy and what to sell short and in what relative amounts. The software also includes sophisticated charting capabilities for pinpointing entry and exit points.

ANOTHER FERTILE FIELD for catalysts is insider trading. Insiders have been cashing in their stock options big-time since the closing weeks of 2010, reports InsiderScore (www.insiderscore.com), although the importance of these trades can be difficult to interpret. Insider buying is fairly easy to read, says Founder Rusty Szurek. It’s usually a vote of confidence for a company by someone who knows its prospects better than most. But stock options are such a significant share of executive compensation, net selling usually means only that managers have the same needs for cash we all do—until it reaches the volumes we’ve recently experienced.

Recent selling volumes bear closer scrutiny for what they might indicate for individual issues or the market as a whole, says Szurek, whose site closely analyzes such trades. Subscriptions are priced for institutions, but anyone can sign up for a free 14-day trial and gain full access to the Website.

A cheaper place to track insiders is on J3 Information Services (www.j3sg.com). Much content, such as insider and company reports and alerts, is free if you merely register. Many additional kinds of insider information are available with a $15 monthly subscription, and at other subscription rates. J3 claims to collect trading data on more than 10,000 companies within minutes of SEC registrations.

Special situations aren’t necessarily incompatible with value investing. Mitchell says he weighs opportunities “the old-fashioned, Benjamin Graham way.” It’s just that it doesn’t take as long.

E-mail: mike@mikhogan.com