How to Track Congress Trades and Insider Buying for Free
A practical guide to the free public sources behind Congress stock trades, SEC Form 4 insider filings and 13F fund holdings, and how to combine them.
Everything in this guide is public. You can follow the trades of members of Congress, corporate insiders and large funds without paying anyone. The difficulty is not access, it is that the information lives in three different systems with three different formats and three different delays.
The three sources
| Source | What it shows | Official place | Typical delay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Congress (STOCK Act) | Stock trades by members of Congress and their families | House Clerk and Senate disclosure sites | Up to 45 days |
| Insiders (Form 4) | Trades by directors, officers and 10% owners | SEC EDGAR | 2 business days |
| Funds (Form 13F) | Quarter-end holdings of managers with $100M+ | SEC EDGAR | Up to 45 days after quarter-end |
Details on each: Congress disclosures, Form 4, Form 13F.
Doing it by hand
- Congress: search the House and Senate disclosure databases by member name. Expect PDFs and varying layouts, and amounts as ranges.
- Insiders: on EDGAR, search a company and filter filings to Form 4. Look at Table I, and keep only codes P (buy) and S (sell).
- Funds: on EDGAR, search the manager and open the latest 13F-HR. Compare with the previous quarter to see changes.
This works, but it is slow, and the hard part is spotting patterns across all three.
What to look for
- Overlap. The same ticker showing up in more than one source is the best reason to look further.
- Clusters. Several insiders buying the same company in a short window.
- Size relative to holdings. A big purchase compared with an insider's existing stake.
- Direction over time. One trade is noise; a sustained trend is information.
- Freshness. A two-day-old Form 4 and a six-week-old congressional disclosure should not carry equal weight.
What not to do
- Do not treat every Form 4 line that is not a sale as a purchase. Most are compensation. See the transaction codes.
- Do not assume copying a politician is a proven strategy. The research is mixed.
- Do not treat a 13F as a live portfolio. It is a snapshot with known blind spots.
Doing it with Bourse
Bourse is built to remove the chore. It reads Congress disclosures, SEC Form 4 filings and 13F holdings as they are published, cleans them up, flags insider clusters (three or more insiders buying the same company within 14 days), and shows everything on one Radar next to news, markets and a daily brief. It is free to start, on Android and on the web.
Bourse provides financial data and editorial information, parts of which are generated by AI. It is not personalised investment advice.
See these filings as they land
Bourse collects Congress trades, SEC Form 4 insider filings and 13F fund holdings in one live feed, and flags insider buying clusters automatically. Free to start.
Bourse provides financial data and editorial information, parts of which are generated by AI. This page is for general education only. It is not personalised investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any financial instrument. Make your own decisions.