When a trade shows up in the public record

Every tool in this catalogue that tracks insiders, funds or politicians is reading the same public filings, and every one of them inherits the same lag. The lag is not a vendor's failing and no subscription fixes it: it is written into the rules that create the filings. Knowing which clock you are on is the difference between using this data and being surprised by it.

How it works

Two separate systems, and readers routinely assume there is one.

Securities disclosures go to the SEC, onto EDGAR, where they are public within a day of acceptance and machine-readable immediately. Insider transactions, large stakes, institutional holdings and fund portfolios all live here.

Congressional disclosures do not. Members of the House file with the Clerk of the House; senators file with the Secretary of the Senate. These are different institutions with different portals, different formats and a different statute behind them — the STOCK Act, not the Exchange Act. Nothing a member of Congress files appears on EDGAR.

Within each system the deadline depends on who is reporting and what happened, and the rules below are the ones a tracker's freshness ultimately rests on.

The deadlines, form by form

Form 4 — two business days. Officers, directors and ten-per-cent holders report changes in their own holdings before the end of the second business day after execution. That deadline came from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which rewrote Exchange Act section 16(a) in 2002, and it is a statutory requirement rather than an SEC scheduling choice.

One exception is worth knowing because it explains filings that look late and are not. Rule 16a-3(g) lets the clock start when a broker notifies the insider, for transactions under a pre-arranged plan where the insider did not pick the execution date — capped at the third business day after the trade. Worst case, a compliant Form 4 can appear five business days after the event.

Form 3 — ten days after becoming an officer, director or ten-per-cent holder. Form 5 — 45 days after the issuer's fiscal year end, and this is where transactions that should have been reported during the year but were not get swept up. A late Form 4 can therefore surface more than a year after the trade, on a form most trackers treat as an afterthought.

Schedule 13D — five business days. Anyone crossing 5% with an intent to influence files within five business days, and amends within two when something material changes; a 1% change in position is deemed material. These deadlines are the ones the SEC set in its 2023 beneficial ownership rules, which cut the old ten-day window. This is the fastest signal of a position being built rather than reported.

Schedule 13G — 45 days after quarter end for qualified institutions, five business days for passive investors, with amendments 45 days after each quarter. Rule 13d-1 carries the full grid. The practical consequence is that the same 5% stake is news in a week if the holder is an activist and up to four and a half months later if it is an index manager.

Form 13F — 45 days after quarter end. Institutional managers exercising discretion over at least $100 million in 13F securities file a list of their US-listed long positions. Most file on the last permitted day, and the SEC grants no extensions.

Form N-PORT — quarterly, 60 days after fiscal quarter end, for registered funds. This one is worth checking rather than remembering: the SEC adopted an amendment moving these reports to monthly filing, and the rule as it currently stands carries compliance dates in late 2027 and 2028. Anything describing fund holdings as a monthly disclosure today is ahead of the rule.

Congressional periodic transaction reports — 30 days, or 45 at the outside. A covered filer reports a security transaction over $1,000 within 30 days of being notified of it and in no case later than 45 days after it happened. The House Ethics guidance states the same test as the earlier of those two dates.

Then a second clock starts. The STOCK Act gives the Clerk and the Senate 30 days after filing to publish the form. A trade made on day zero, reported on day 45 and published on day 75 has broken no rule at any point.

What each form leaves out

A 13F is not a portfolio. The SEC's own FAQ lists the exclusions: short positions are not reported, nor is cash, nor are securities that are not on the Official List of 13F securities, which leaves out most non-US listings. Holdings under both 10,000 shares and $200,000 may be omitted. It is filed at firm level, so a manager running several strategies appears as one book.

A Form 4 does not say why. Since the SEC's 2022 amendments the form carries a mandatory checkbox showing whether the transaction ran under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 plan — the difference between a decision made this week and one made months ago. The box has been required on reports filed since 1 April 2023, so any series spanning that date changes shape partway through. Not every tracker exposes it.

A congressional report gives a range, not an amount. 5 U.S.C. 13104 sets ten statutory bands, the lowest being "not more than $15,000". Since the reporting trigger is a transaction exceeding $1,000, the most common disclosure in the record spans a fifteenfold range. Every dollar figure printed by a congressional tracker is a choice it made — midpoint, floor or ceiling — and the choice is rarely labelled.

The deadline is weakly enforced. Under 5 U.S.C. 13106 a report filed more than 30 days late carries a $200 fee, which the supervising ethics office may waive in extraordinary circumstances. That is the ordinary consequence, and it is why filings months or years late are a recurring feature of the data rather than an anomaly.

Why third-party trackers exist at all

For SEC filings the answer is normalisation. EDGAR is organised by CIK rather than ticker, a 13F is whatever the manager typed, and issuer names, share classes and CUSIPs disagree between filings. Every paid product in this field is selling that reconciliation.

For congressional data the answer is cruder. The Clerk publishes a structured annual index — a tab-separated file naming each filer, filing type and document ID — but the filings themselves are PDFs, and many are scans of paper with no extractable text. The index tells you a report exists; a human or an OCR pipeline is what turns it into a row with a ticker in it.

What you can do about it

Date every row by the event, not by the filing. Any tracker worth using exposes both the transaction date and the report date. If it shows only one, assume it is the filing date and treat the gap as unknown.

Match the dataset to the question. For anything that needs to be current, Form 4 and Schedule 13D are the only two disclosures fast enough to matter, and both are free at source. Building a thesis on 13F holdings means accepting a picture of last quarter.

Check the 10b5-1 box before reading anything into a sale. A planned sale under a pre-existing arrangement and a discretionary one look identical without it. If the tool you use does not carry that field, the underlying filing does.

Never compare a congressional dollar figure between trackers. They are derived from the same bands by different rules. Compare the bands, or compare counts of transactions.

Check a rule before repeating a deadline. The beneficial ownership windows changed in 2023, the 10b5-1 box arrived in 2023, and the N-PORT move to monthly reporting has a compliance date years out. Every deadline on this page is linked to the rule or statute that sets it, and those documents are free to read.

Go to the source when the answer has to be right. EDGAR's APIs need no key and publish submissions within a second of acceptance. The Clerk's index file is a download. A subscription buys convenience and reconciliation, and it cannot buy you a filing that has not been made yet.