Insider, 13F & Congressional Trade Trackers

Four different readers arrive here, and they want four different records. 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. If it is the short side of a stock, the official figure is a free filing and what is sold is estimates and borrow rates around it.

• Form 4 screening, free, no account — OpenInsider.
• Form 4, 13D/G and 13F in real time, one subscription — SecForm4 from $44.95 a month; its free view is six months old by design.
• Congressional disclosures, free — Capitol Trades.
• Everything over one REST API — Quiver Quantitative from $30 a month.
• Deepest 13F history — WhaleWisdom, back to 2001.
• Every 13F since 2014, free, no account, code you can run yourself — 13F.info.
• Following named investors — Dataroma, 83 managers, free; Valuesider, 97, with mutual funds and paid alerts.
• Funds, insiders and Congress on one page — HedgeFollow across 10,000-plus filers from $45 a quarter, or Stockcircle across about sixty investors for $99 a year.
• Sizing up an asset manager, not a stock — AUM 13F, Form ADV beside 13F, Form D and pension commitments.
• Ownership plus short interest, beyond the US — Fintel from $7.95 a month billed annually.
• Insider filings outside the US — Insider Screener, seventeen markets, self-serve; 2iQ Insider Transactions Data, fifty countries, by contract.
• The filings themselves, raw and free — SEC EDGAR, no key, ten requests a second.
• The official short-interest filing, with history and an API — ChartExchange, free to browse, $19.95 a month for history, $29.95 with the API.
• Short interest estimated from the lending pool — ORTEX, the live estimate on Advanced at $99 a month billed annually; S3 Short Interest Data for institutions, by contract.
• Cost to borrow, free — iBorrowDesk, Interactive Brokers' own rates and availability.

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 — unless the tracker holds it back on purpose. SecForm4's public pages run six months behind, stated in a banner, because real time is what its subscription sells.

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. Few trackers here list them on their own: SecForm4 carries them as a daily list and as history, and HedgeFollow folds 13D, 13G and Form 4 into a fund's 13F holdings, so a position there can be more current than the quarterly filing alone.

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. A tracker can add its own lag on top: AUM 13F was still showing a manager's first-quarter 13F in October 2026, more than seven weeks after the second-quarter filing reached EDGAR.

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. Cost to borrow runs on a faster clock: iBorrowDesk refreshes Interactive Brokers' file about every fifteen minutes for North America during US hours.

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: OpenInsider has the deepest filter set and history back to 2003, for nothing. SecForm4 is the paid version of the same feed with 13D/G and 13F beside it, a CSV of the day's filings on its $49.95 Pro tier, and no API. Outside the US the choice is between Insider Screener's seventeen markets at published prices and 2iQ's fifty countries, whose case is the reconciliation — a stable identifier for each insider across companies and filings, and symbology mapped to Bloomberg and Refinitiv — sold only to institutions.

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. The first fork is every filer or a chosen few. WhaleWisdom and 13F.info take every filer — WhaleWisdom from 2001, 13F.info free from 2014, with a two-quarter comparison and a list of every manager reporting a given CUSIP. HedgeFollow takes 10,000-plus institutions from 2019 and meters the depth: a fund's top 50 holdings free, the rest from $45 a quarter. Dataroma and Valuesider both follow a hand-picked list of value investors, and the differences are concrete — Dataroma's 83 managers run back to 2006 with no account and no alerts; Valuesider's 97 start in 2013, include mutual funds and ETFs that report holdings on N-PORT rather than 13F, and sell alerts, fund scores and the managers' own Form 4 trades from $25 a month. Stockcircle sets about sixty investors beside congressional and insider filings for $99 a year, on data licensed from Financial Modeling Prep. AUM 13F turns the question round: one page per asset manager, joining Form ADV, 13F, Form D, 13D/G and pension-fund commitments, for a fundraiser or allocator sizing up a firm rather than a reader copying its holdings.

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. HedgeFollow and Stockcircle carry congressional trades as one tab of three.

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. ChartExchange republishes the official FINRA figure, fails-to-deliver and Interactive Brokers' borrow fee, free to browse. ORTEX sells an estimate from the lending pool at published prices. S3 sells what it calls revised short interest, built from custody, prime-broker and regulatory data, plus three borrow rates — the offer rate a borrower pays, the bid rate custody banks charge prime brokers and the last rate for new shares — hourly, and only by contract. iBorrowDesk is the free end: one broker's borrow fee, rebate and shares available, with a year of history, and its own FAQ says plainly that it is not short-interest data.

What the money buys

Nothing at all, four times. OpenInsider, Capitol Trades, Dataroma and 13F.info are free, need no account and have no paid tier. OpenInsider and Dataroma run on Google ads, Capitol Trades is the shop window for 2iQ's institutional data, and 13F.info is one person's project with no advertising on the pages checked. None has an API — 13F.info's substitute is its licence, the whole application including the EDGAR downloader published under MIT — and all four are better at their one job than the paid generalists are at that same job.

Time, from $44.95 a month. SecForm4 sells the same public filings its free view shows, six months sooner. It is the only product here whose free tier is a demonstration rather than a product.

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. HedgeFollow and Valuesider meter depth the same way for less: HedgeFollow by holdings per fund and tracker window, with no monthly plan; Valuesider by years of history — five on a free account, ten at $25 a month, all of it at $47.

Coverage outside the US. Fintel goes widest at consumer prices — thirty-odd markets for ownership and short interest — and it is also the one with no true monthly plan, so the real entry price is a quarter at a time, $32.85. For insider dealings alone, Insider Screener covers seventeen markets from $19 a month.

No price, by contract. 2iQ and S3 publish no number anywhere. 2iQ offers a three-month evaluation free through AWS Data Exchange and prices production access on request; S3's listing says the price varies with the number of users in the enterprise, and neither has a purchase path an individual can take. What the contract buys is reconciliation work and lending data that no public filing carries.

The pattern is worth naming before you compare tiers. The filings are free from the SEC, the House and the Senate, and almost 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. The exception is the lending data on the short side, which comes from lenders and prime brokers rather than from a regulator, and is priced accordingly.

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.

A borrow fee is not a short position. One broker's rate and availability, as iBorrowDesk and ChartExchange serve it, says how expensive and how scarce the short side is at that broker. It does not say how many shares are sold short.

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 — and not every series sold here is point-in-time: S3 documents that its revised short interest restates the past.