Follow the Filings → About

What Follow the Filings is

A data publisher for U.S. insider-trading disclosures: the filing is the record, these pages are the index.

Follow the Filings reads every SEC Form 4 insider filing and every Senate periodic transaction report as it is accepted, cleans it, and publishes one page per filing with the SEC acceptance time, the moment the filing was first read, the Table I transactions, a price check and the 30-day flow at that company. The data is reconciled every morning against EDGAR's own daily index, and the difference is published on /coverage rather than claimed away. The site has been live since August 2026.

What it is not

• Not investment advice. No page says buy or sell, and no reply to email does either.
• Not commentary on people. A reporting person's name appears once, for attribution; the subject is the money flow, and every pattern is printed with its most ordinary explanation.
• Not affiliated with the SEC, the U.S. Senate, any exchange, broker or issuer.
• Not "complete" by assertion. Completeness is measured as a set difference against EDGAR's index and published daily; when a day does not reconcile, the pipeline's own job fails and the day stays listed.

Sources

• SEC EDGAR — Form 4 and Form 4/A. Each filing is read from the complete submission text file the SEC's daily index points to, not from a derived listing.
• U.S. Senate eFD — periodic transaction reports (PTRs). Amounts are disclosed as ranges and are always shown as ranges.
• Market prices from a public end-of-day source, used only to check that a filed price is consistent with the market close; inconsistent rows are flagged and never published as a pattern.

How the pipeline works

• Intake. The SEC's current-filings feed is polled every 15 minutes between 06:00 and 22:00 ET on business days, with a second intraday stream from the SEC full-text index and a full pass over the daily index every night. The time from SEC acceptance to first read is measured per filing and printed on each page.
• Parsing. Only Form 4 Table I (non-derivative) rows are delivered. A filing whose document says N transactions but parses to a different count is marked unreadable and stays red in the reconciliation; it is never recorded as "no transactions".
• Cleaning. Duplicate lots, amendment copies, impossible values, ticker-less rows and bulk events priced identically for many holders are removed, and the removals are counted and published rather than silently dropped.
• Fixed definitions. A cluster buy is 3 or more distinct insiders at one issuer reporting open-market purchases within a 10-trading-day window, with positive net open-market flow over the period shown. Serial buying is one reporting person buying on 3 or more distinct trading days within a 10-trading-day window. A late filing is a Form 4 accepted more than two business days after the transaction (federal holidays excluded) — a measurement, not a legal finding. Filings at registered-fund issuers are excluded from pattern labels. The definitions live in one code module and are the same on every page and in every feed; all of them are in the glossary.
• Pages. Filing, company and daily pages are generated from a fixed template with no free-written sentences. Amended filings (Form 4/A) replace the original page with a notice; nothing is deleted.
• Reconciliation. Every morning each accession in EDGAR's daily index for the last ten business days is checked against the processing ledger. The result, per day, is on /coverage.

Research

In August 2026 the same pipeline was used for a pre-registered backtest of 750,659 open-market insider purchases filed since 2006. The naive average excess return looked large; the median was negative; only cluster buys showed a small, short-lived positive signal in the first month after filing. The write-up, the pre-registration file and the verification steps are at /articles/insider-buying-backtest.

Using the data

A cleaned sample (861 rows, CSV) and a real feed payload (JSON, schema ftf-feed-v1) are free to download without signup. Daily feeds, watchlists and custom datasets are described on /data. When citing a page, cite the SEC accession number in its URL; every number on the page traces back to that document.

Who runs it

An independent data studio. The pipeline is automated; a person reads every email, every correction and every page before it is edited. Reach us at /contact.