Public Filings

This is the one screen whose data is not ours. It reproduces public disclosure documents that lawmakers, company insiders and large funds have to file.

Open Public Filings

At a glance

Three kinds of people have to tell the public when they trade. This screen shows all three.

• Members of Congress. A 2012 law makes a member disclose certain trades, set out in that law. The deadline is 30 days after they learn of the trade. It is 45 days after the trade itself at the very latest. The document is called a Periodic Transaction Report.
• Company insiders. An officer, a director, or anyone owning more than 10% of a company files a Form 4. The deadline is two business days after they trade their own company's stock. This is the only feed here that is close to current.
• The famous funds. A manager running more than $100 million files a 13F. It lists what they held on the last day of a quarter. It can arrive up to 45 days after that quarter ends. This is where "what does Buffett own" comes from.

Key difference. Congress and Insiders show single trades. Famous funds shows a list of holdings from a date that has already passed.

All of these documents are free and public. We gather them and put them on one screen.

Two numbers then sit on every row. Both are ours to print, and both need reading carefully.

• The lateness column. It counts the days between the day they traded and the day the public could read it. The screen prints it as 12d late. A bigger number means older news. Three days or fewer prints green, four to twenty days prints in the plain text colour, and more than twenty days prints red. None of the colours mean fresh. They only say how far behind the row is. If we cannot work the number out, the column shows a dot.
• Tonight's rank. Every evening our models sort about a thousand stocks from strongest to weakest. This column says where the name sat in that queue, as an ordinal such as 88th. A higher number sat nearer the top and a lower number nearer the bottom. It is an ordering of names against each other. It is never money and never a return. If we hold the name but have no place for it that night, the column reads ranked on its own.

Why the lateness column matters

Everything in this screen is old news.

• Funds. A quarterly report can be 45 days older than the day you read it. It is a photograph of one instant. The manager may have sold the whole position the next morning. They need not tell anyone until the next quarterly filing.
• Congress. The deadline is 30 days after the member learns of the trade, and 45 days after the trade at the latest. So a row you read today can describe a trade made 45 days earlier.
• Insiders. Two business days is the fastest deadline here. By the time the filing appears, two days of trading in that stock have already happened.

A tracker that hides the lateness is selling yesterday's newspaper as this morning's.

What it shows

Three tabs. Congress, Insiders and Famous funds. The line under the tabs states the legal deadline for whichever source you are reading.

Congress

Trades that members of Congress reported, on a Periodic Transaction Report. The deadline is 30 days after they learn of the trade, 45 days after the trade itself at the very latest. The tab the pane opens on.

Insiders

What a company's own officers, directors and 10% owners filed on Form 4 about trading that company's stock, within two business days. The only feed here that is close to current.

Famous funds

What a manager running more than $100 million held on the last day of a quarter, from their 13F. It can arrive up to 45 days after that quarter ends.

A rebuild time. The right-hand corner says how long ago we last rebuilt the feed. A feed that has quietly stopped looks exactly like a quiet week in Congress.

When a tab is empty. Famous funds says there are no fund holdings to show. Congress or Insiders says no filings match your filter.

When the last update did not finish. The screen says the list is incomplete, so an empty result is not proof nothing was filed.

What each row shows. Congress and Insiders are tables. The columns are:

• Who filed. The member or the insider, with their role underneath.
• Name. The ticker of the stock they traded.
• Did. Whether they bought or sold. It can also read "sold part" or "exchanged".
• Size band, on the Congress tab. A lowest and a highest figure, such as $1,001 to $15,000.
• Value, on the Insiders tab. What the trade was worth in dollars.
• Traded. The day the trade happened.
• Disclosed. The day the filing was published, with the lateness beside it.
• Tonight's rank. Where our own models put that name, as described above.

The size is a band. Congressional filings never give an exact amount. They give a lowest and a highest figure, and that band is what appears on screen.

Key difference. The colour says how old a row is. The size band says how much money the trade involved.

Fund cards. Famous funds are cards. A card names the manager, the quarter the report covers, and how many days old that quarter now is. It then lists the largest positions.

A weight on each holding. That is how big a share of everything the fund disclosed in that filing the holding was, as a percentage.

One word for how each holding moved since the previous quarter:

• new. It was not in the last filing.
• held. The number of shares moved by less than 2% either way.
• added. The number of shares grew, and the card says by how much.
• trimmed. The number of shares fell, and the card says by how much.

A rank button. Tonight's rank is a button. Click it and every screen on screen switches to that name. You can go from "an insider sold this" straight to the Market Scan's own read on it.

What is deliberately not here

• No performance for anyone. No "this member is up 40%". No fund returns. No league table of who trades best. The only performance figures we publish about ourselves are the paper record on the Record page, and we publish none about other people. Ranking politicians by how much money they made is exactly the kind of claim we do not make about anyone.
• No copy-this-portfolio feature. The people named have no connection to Ohey and have never heard of it. Appearing in a public record is not an endorsement of anything.
• Names we do not cover. Our models rank a set number of names each night. A filing on any other name is still shown in full. Its rank column reads not ranked.

What it is good for

Use this as background on a name.

• Ownership context on a name you already have open. The scan gives you its read on a name. This screen can tell you an officer of that company sold a large block last week.
• The story behind a headline. A headline says a politician "bought the dip". The filing shows the date, the size band and how late the disclosure was. That is usually a duller story.
• What a manager you admire actually held. The days since that quarter ended then show how little it tells you about what they hold today.

Using it day to day

• Read the lateness column first. Then add your own waiting time to it. A row filed 45 days ago, about a trade made 30 days before that, is a 75-day-old fact.
• The size band is wide. "$1,001 to $15,000" is fifteen times bigger at the top than at the bottom. The filing genuinely does not say where in that band the trade fell.
• A 13F covers long US shares only. These are all left out:
  • Bets that a share will fall. Those are called short positions.
  • Contracts to buy or sell later. Those are called options, and most of them are left out.
  • Bonds, cash and foreign holdings. Anything held outside the US is left out too.
• A "top holding" is only the top of what must be disclosed. That is not necessarily the biggest thing the fund owns.
• Insider selling is usually not a signal. Executives are paid in stock and sell on schedules set months in advance. The feed shows open-market buys and sells only, so option exercises and grants are left out. Even then, a sale is more often a diversification decision than an opinion.
• Only one column here is ours. That is tonight's rank. Everything else is somebody else's document.

Frequently asked questions

How often is it updated? We rebuild the feed on a schedule. The corner of the screen says how long ago that was. Congressional filings and quarterly reports arrive in bursts. Insider filings arrive every trading day.

Is it legal for them to trade like this? Members of Congress may trade. The 2012 law requires them to disclose it. That is a question about the rules, not about this screen.

Can I get alerted when a specific person files? Not today. Tell us if it would be useful. Nothing in the filings stops us building it. Whether we do depends on whether people ask.

Related panes

• Market Scan: our own ranking of tonight's names. That is what the rank column here points at.
• Rank Not Return: what that ranking is, and what it is not.
• Watchlist: where to keep a name you began following because of a filing.