# Insider, 13F & Congressional Trade Trackers

Insider filings, fund holdings, congressional trades and short interest — who bought what, how late each record is, and what every form leaves out.

*https://stockmarketstack.com/categories/insider-13f-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](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/openinsider), free and minutes behind EDGAR. If it is what
a fund owns, that is 13F, and [WhaleWisdom](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/whalewisdom) goes back to 2001 with an API on
top. If it is congressional trading, [Capitol Trades](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/capitol-trades) covers three years
free without an account.

- **Form 4 screening, free, no account** — [OpenInsider](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/openinsider).
- **Congressional disclosures, free** — [Capitol Trades](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/capitol-trades).
- **Everything over one REST API** — [Quiver Quantitative](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/quiver-quantitative) from $30 a month.
- **Deepest 13F history** — [WhaleWisdom](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/whalewisdom), back to 2001.
- **Following named investors** — [Dataroma](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/dataroma), 83 managers, free.
- **Ownership plus short interest, beyond the US** — [Fintel](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/fintel) from $7.95 a month billed annually.
- **Insider filings outside the US** — [Insider Screener](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/insider-screener), seventeen markets.
- **The filings themselves, raw and free** — [SEC EDGAR](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/sec-edgar), no key, ten requests a second.
- **Short interest estimated daily** — [ORTEX](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/ortex) from $39 a month, or [ChartExchange](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/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](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/openinsider),
[Capitol Trades](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/capitol-trades) and [Dataroma](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/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](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/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](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/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](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/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](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/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](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/sec-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](https://stockmarketstack.com/categories/fundamentals-research) — that is where
[sec-api.io](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/sec-api-io) and [GuruFocus](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/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](https://stockmarketstack.com/categories/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](https://stockmarketstack.com/categories/backtesting-frameworks) with point-in-time data, not a
tracker's own backtest button.

## Cards

- [13F.info](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/13f-info.md) — Every 13F since 2014, free and account-free, from a Rails app you can run yourself.
- [2iQ Insider Transactions Data](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/2iq-insider-data.md) — Insider dealings from fifty countries, harmonised and identified, sold by contract.
- [Capitol Trades](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/capitol-trades.md) — Three years of US congressional stock disclosures, filterable and free with no account.
- [ChartExchange](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/chartexchange.md) — The official short interest, IBKR's borrow fee and SEC fails, sold feature by feature.
- [Dataroma](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/dataroma.md) — 83 value investors' 13F portfolios, twenty years of history, free and without an account.
- [Fintel](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/fintel.md) — Ownership, insider and short-interest filings across thirty markets, none of it free.
- [GuruFocus](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/gurufocus.md) — Thirty years of financials, a deep screener and 13F guru portfolios, sold by region.
- [HedgeFollow](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/hedgefollow.md) — 13F, Form 4 and congressional filings from 10,000 funds, with the depth behind a paywall.
- [iBorrowDesk](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/iborrowdesk.md) — Interactive Brokers' borrow fees and availability, free, refreshed through the day.
- [Insider Screener](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/insider-screener.md) — Directors' dealings from seventeen regulators in one screener, with a paid REST API.
- [OpenInsider](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/openinsider.md) — Every SEC Form 4, minutes behind EDGAR, through a 40-field screener and no account.
- [ORTEX](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/ortex.md) — Short interest estimated daily from the lending pool, with cost to borrow beside it.
- [Quiver Quantitative](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/quiver-quantitative.md) — US political and SEC disclosure data — congress, insiders, lobbying — over one REST API.
- [S3 Short Interest Data](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/s3-partners.md) — Revised short interest and three-sided borrow rates, delivered by contract only.
- [sec-api.io](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/sec-api-io.md) — Every EDGAR filing since 1993 as JSON, plus a websocket push of new ones.
- [SEC EDGAR](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/sec-edgar.md) — Every US filing since 1994, free and keyless — the limit is ten requests a second.
- [SecForm4.com](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/secform4.md) — Real-time Form 4, 13D/G and 13F screens — and a free view held six months back.
- [Stockcircle](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/stockcircle.md) — Sixty superinvestors, congressional trades and insiders in one place, for $99 a year.
- [WhaleWisdom](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/whalewisdom.md) — Institutional 13F holdings back to 2001, queryable from a signed REST API.

## FAQ

### How soon after an insider buys does it become public?

Two business days. A Form 4 is due within two business days of the transaction, and the trackers here are minutes behind EDGAR once it lands — OpenInsider published a filing 85 seconds after EDGAR accepted it. This is by far the freshest record in the category, and the only one where speed is worth paying for.

### How stale is 13F data by the time I read it?

Up to four and a half months. A 13F is due 45 days after quarter end and most managers file on the last day, so a holding you read in mid-February is what the fund owned on 31 December — and it may have been sold in January. Nothing any vendor does fixes this, because the lag is in the filing rule.

### Is congressional trading data free?

The data is, and so is one of the good tools. Capitol Trades gives three years of House and Senate STOCK Act disclosures with fifteen filters, no account and no paid tier. What money buys is an API — Quiver Quantitative sells the same filings over REST from $30 a month — and the ability to join congressional trades to insider and 13F data in one query.

### What does a 13F not show?

Short positions, cash, bonds, most non-US listings and anything held through a derivative structure the manager is not required to report. It is a long-only snapshot of US-listed 13F securities at one instant, filed at the firm level, so a manager running several funds appears as one book. A 13F portfolio is not the fund's portfolio.

### Can I get insider and 13F data over an API?

Yes, and it is the main thing the free sites do not have. Quiver Quantitative sells congressional, insider and 13F datasets over REST from $30 a month, WhaleWisdom has a signed API and an Excel add-in from $300 a year, and Fintel and HedgeFollow publish their own. OpenInsider, Capitol Trades and Dataroma are web-only, and scraping them is against their terms rather than a workaround.

### Do these tools tell me what to buy?

No, and the ones that imply otherwise are selling a score rather than a filing. Everything here is a view over a public disclosure that is already weeks or months old by the rules that produced it. What a tracker can honestly tell you is who filed what and when — the distance between that and a decision is yours.