THE OWNERSHIP RESEARCH GUIDE
Someone made a move.
What does it tell you?
Politician disclosures, institutional holdings and insider transactions offer different pieces of evidence. Use this guide to understand what was reported, when it became public and what deserves a closer look.
Start with a question, then inspect the evidence.
Use the hub to ask who has reported activity in a stock, whether several independent people are involved, and whether that activity fits the company’s fundamentals. A filing does not tell you an investor’s entire strategy, current position or expected return.
| Dataset | What it tells you | What it cannot establish |
|---|---|---|
| Congress disclosures | Reported transaction, owner, date and amount range | Exact price, current holdings or the reason for trading |
| Form 13F | Covered holdings at the end of a quarter | Exact trade dates, all assets, short positions or the complete hedge |
| Insider filings | Reported transactions by officers, directors and other reporting owners | Whether each sale is discretionary or whether a purchase predicts returns |
01 / Read politician disclosures.
Open Politician Trades and search by name, ticker or company. Compare the transaction date with the filing date. The reporting delay matters: prices and circumstances can change before a transaction becomes public.
- Owner: the account can belong to the member, spouse, dependent or a joint owner. Do not assume the member personally placed the trade.
- Amount: a disclosed range is not an exact transaction value. The minimum-value filter uses the lower bound. The hub does not convert a range into an invented fill price.
- Activity: purchases, sales, exchanges and unclassified transactions remain separate.
House guidance generally requires covered transactions over $1,000 to be reported within 30 days of notice and no later than 45 days after the transaction. Late filings and amendments can occur. Review the original disclosure linked from the record.
02 / Compare institutional holdings.
Hedge Fund Activity covers selected managers, including hedge funds and other institutional investors. Berkshire Hathaway is an institutional investor, not a hedge fund. This is a selected watchlist, not the full 13F universe.
Form 13F generally reports covered securities held at quarter end and is due within 45 days. The hub compares share counts between two consecutive available quarter-end extracts for the same security. A first observed holding becomes “New position” only when the prior-quarter extract is available; otherwise it is shown as “Holding.”
- Increased / reduced: disclosed shares changed across quarter ends. Corporate actions, transfers and amendments can also change counts.
- Exited: the security is absent from the next complete extract. This is not an execution record or a known sale date.
- Position value: the reported quarter-end value, not the cost paid. A value increase alone does not prove buying.
- Portfolio weight: percentage of the available reported portfolio value, including reported option entries. It is not the manager’s total assets under management.
Options and different security classes remain separate. Some monetary fields are withheld where reporting units have not been validated. Unresolved tickers are identified by CUSIP rather than guessed; their filings remain available for inspection. Put/call entries do not establish a simple bullish or bearish trade and do not qualify for share-accumulation signals.
Continue with the hedge fund research guide for ways to investigate a company before the next filing.
03 / Separate purchases from other insider activity.
Open Insider Trades to inspect reporting owners, roles, shares, dates and transaction codes. Form 4 transactions generally must be reported within two business days, subject to exceptions.
The hub treats P purchase codes as purchases and S sale codes as sales. Awards, option exercises, gifts, tax withholding and other codes remain “Other transaction.” An acquisition code on its own does not establish an open-market buy. A sale may reflect a prearranged plan, taxes or diversification.
Transaction value is calculated from reported shares multiplied by reported price only when both are supplied and the price is positive. Unknown prices remain unknown. Follow the filing link to inspect ownership, footnotes and trading-plan information.
How the research signals work.
Signals are transparent evidence flags computed from the available disclosure snapshot. They are not model forecasts, backtested strategies, performance rankings or instructions to trade.
- Politician buying overlap: at least two distinct politicians reported non-derivative purchases of the same ticker in filings dated within the last 30 calendar days.
- Insider buying cluster: at least two distinct reporting insiders disclosed P-code purchases of the same ticker in that filing window. Awards, options, warrants, restricted securities and other acquisitions do not count.
- Institutional accumulation: at least two tracked managers reported new or increased share holdings of the same ticker in filings within that window. This describes quarter-end comparisons, not recent execution.
Counts use distinct reporters so one person’s repeated transactions cannot create a multi-person cluster. The filing-date window does not imply the trade took place within the last 30 days. Signal coverage is limited by the feeds and managers shown; no flag means no qualifying overlap in this snapshot, not that no activity occurred.
Always inspect the evidence and dates. No win rate, simulated return or predictive score is shown without a defined and verified historical study.
A useful five-minute workflow.
- Search a stock or investor. Start in Activity. Narrow by purchases/additions or sales/reductions and use filing-date filters.
- Open the record. Compare the trade date, quarter-end date, filing date and amount basis. Read the original filing.
- Review the person or manager. Click the reporter’s name to view their available activity. Counts describe coverage, not skill or returns.
- Read across the evidence. Use Signals to inspect independent overlap, then review company research, earnings and upcoming events.
- Save the idea. Use the star to save a ticker or follow an investor. Watchlist shows their available records in this browser. Export the filtered CSV with dates and filing links for your own analysis.
Watchlists stay on this device and do not enable notifications. Clearing browser storage removes the list. The website does not automatically copy trades or place orders.
Sources, timing and coverage.
The website displays a saved disclosure snapshot from StocksToBuyNow.ai. The backend checks covered feeds every six hours once deployed. The homepage and section pages use the last available snapshot and request newer saved coverage; visiting a page does not launch a provider collection job.
Coverage is bounded to the latest 300 records per congressional chamber and for insiders, plus selected institutional portfolios. It is not an exhaustive historical archive. Each feed carries its own update date and availability state. During an outage, the last dated data is retained and identified as older coverage.
Published research articles are shown separately for context. Their prose is not converted into structured transactions or used as automatic filing evidence.
- U.S. House financial disclosures and House Ethics financial disclosure guidance
- U.S. Senate financial disclosure guidance
- SEC Form 13F instructions
- SEC guide to Forms 3, 4 and 5
Disclosure data can be late, incomplete or amended. Educational research does not establish wrongdoing, privileged knowledge or future performance.