Insider, 13F & Congressional Trade Trackers

Three different readers arrive here, and they want three different filings. If the question is what officers and directors are doing with their own stock, that is Form 4 and the fastest record in the category — OpenInsider, free and minutes behind EDGAR. If it is what a fund owns, that is 13F, and WhaleWisdom goes back to 2001 with an API on top. If it is congressional trading, Capitol Trades covers three years free without an account.

• Form 4 screening, free, no account — OpenInsider.
• Congressional disclosures, free — Capitol Trades.
• Everything over one REST API — Quiver Quantitative from $30 a month.
• Deepest 13F history — WhaleWisdom, back to 2001.
• Following named investors — Dataroma, 83 managers, free.
• Ownership plus short interest, beyond the US — Fintel from $7.95 a month billed annually.
• Insider filings outside the US — Insider Screener, seventeen markets.
• The filings themselves, raw and free — SEC EDGAR, no key, ten requests a second.
• Short interest estimated daily — ORTEX from $39 a month, or ChartExchange for the official filing from $19.95.

Everything here is late, and by exactly how much is knowable

This is the one thing that separates the category from every other on the site. A market data API is judged on latency measured in milliseconds; here the clock is set by a filing deadline, it runs in days and weeks, and no vendor can beat it. Before comparing two products, know which record you are buying and how old it is when it arrives.

Form 4 — two business days. Officers, directors and ten-per-cent holders report their own transactions, and the deadline is two business days from the trade. Add the tracker's own lag, which is seconds to minutes, and this is as close to live as the disclosure record gets.

Schedule 13D and 13G — days to quarters. The activist stake and its passive twin. 13D is the one that moves a price, and it is the filing to watch when somebody is building a position rather than reporting one.

Form 13F — 45 days after quarter end. Institutional managers over the reporting threshold list their US-listed long positions once a quarter, 45 days after it closes, and most file on the last available day. The data is therefore between 45 and 135 days old depending on when in the quarter the trade happened.

STOCK Act reports — 30 to 45 days, and often far longer. A member of Congress files within 30 days of being notified of a transaction and no later than 45 days after it. Late filings are common and the penalty is small: one row on Capitol Trades published in September 2026 covered a trade made fifteen months earlier.

Short interest — twice a month, plus estimates. The official US figure is reported on a semi-monthly settlement cycle and published about a week later, which is why vendors sell modelled daily numbers from securities-lending feeds beside it. Those are estimates of a different quantity — shares out on loan, not short positions — and a product that does not say which of the two it is selling is the one to distrust. FINRA publishes the official file itself, free, with days to cover already in it.

Four jobs, and the price shapes that go with them

Insider. Form 4 and Form 144 — what the people who run the company are doing with their own shares. The job is filtering, not fetching, because the raw feed is enormous and mostly automatic sales. Free tools are strongest here.

Institutional. 13F, 13D/G and fund holdings. Judged on history depth and on whether the tool can answer a question across funds rather than one fund at a time. This is where the annual subscriptions live.

Political. STOCK Act periodic transaction reports, plus lobbying spend and government contracts in the tools that go further. The data is public and free; what is sold is the join and the API.

Short interest. Exchange and FINRA reporting, securities-lending estimates, cost to borrow and fails to deliver. It sits here because it is the same kind of object — a required disclosure about positioning — and it is the one job in the category where the underlying data is genuinely expensive.

What the money buys

Nothing at all, three times. OpenInsider, Capitol Trades and Dataroma are free, complete, and carry ads instead of a paid tier. None has an API, and all three are better at their one job than the paid generalists are at that same job.

An API, from $30 a month. Quiver Quantitative is the clearest case — $30 for the political datasets, $75 once SEC filings are included, and commercial use is a separate contact-only tier. The free website is the same data without the key.

Depth and history, by the year. WhaleWisdom charges $300 to $500 a year and what you are buying is 2001 onward plus a query allowance, not a different dataset.

Coverage outside the US. Fintel is the one that goes wide — thirty-odd markets — and it is also the one with no true monthly plan, so the real entry price is a quarter at a time.

The pattern is worth naming before you compare tiers. The filings are free from the SEC, the House and the Senate, and every product here is parsing, joining and filtering them. You are buying the shape of the data, not access to it — which is why the free tools are competitive and why the paid ones sell APIs, history and cross-filing joins rather than exclusivity.

What none of this can tell you

A 13F is a long-only snapshot, filed at the firm level. No shorts, no cash, no most non-US holdings, no intra-quarter round trip. A fund that bought and sold inside the quarter appears never to have owned the stock.

A Form 4 does not say why. Since April 2023 the form carries a mandatory checkbox showing whether the sale ran under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 plan — which is the difference between a decision made this week and one made last year. Not every tracker exposes that box, and OpenInsider is one that does not.

Congressional reports are ranges, not amounts. The filing gives a bracket, not a number, so any dollar figure a tracker prints is the midpoint of a range or the bottom of one, and the choice is the vendor's.

Every product in this listing is a view over a public record. It reports what was disclosed and when — not what it means, and not what to do about it. Treat a tool that blends filings into a score or a signal as what it is, and check what is underneath the number before you pay for it.

Where this category connects

The filings themselves come from EDGAR, free and with no key, and a tool bought for all filings rather than for ownership lives next door in fundamental data and research platforms — that is where sec-api.io and GuruFocus sit, both of which also appear here as secondary members. If what you want is the price series rather than the filing, that is market data APIs. If the plan is to test whether any of this predicts anything, the honest place to find out is a backtesting framework with point-in-time data, not a tracker's own backtest button.