How to track what Congress, Hedge Funds and Insiders are buying and selling.

You can look up every stock trade Nancy Pelosi makes. The same goes for Warren Buffett, and for any chief executive buying or selling shares of their own company. All of it is legal, all of it is on the record, and none of it costs a cent to read. Each group files what it buys and sells somewhere. The only trick is knowing where to look.

Congress: the 45-day trail

Start with the politicians, because they're who people ask about most. Under the STOCK Act, a law passed in 2012, every member of the House and Senate has to report a stock trade within 45 days, using a form called a periodic transaction report. Pelosi gets the headlines, but plenty of members trade more actively than she does, Tommy Tuberville and Josh Gottheimer among them. Our Capitol tracker shows who bought what, ordered by date, and puts a running twelve-month return against the S&P 500 beside each name. If you want the nuts and bolts of the forms themselves, we cover them in a separate guide.

Hedge funds: a quarterly snapshot

Big investors move on a slower clock, and the filing to watch is the 13F. Any manager with more than $100 million under management has to file one with the SEC within 45 days after a quarter closes, listing the US stocks it held on the final day of that quarter. It's how you find out that Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway bought more of a stock or sold some of it, or what Michael Burry's Scion and Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness were holding. Our hedge fund tracker follows 40 of these funds, each on its own page, pulled straight from the filings. Keep two things in mind, both explained in our 13F explainer. The snapshot can already be a quarter old by the time it reaches you, and it says nothing about what the fund sold short.

Company insiders: the fastest look

The fastest disclosures come straight from inside the companies, on something called the Form 4. When an officer, director or big shareholder trades their own company's stock, they have to file it with the SEC within two business days, which makes this the freshest look of the three. One catch shapes how you read it. A lot of insider selling runs on autopilot, set months ahead under what's called a 10b5-1 plan, and a sale on a schedule tells you far less than one an insider decided to make that day. Our insider tracker marks which is which. In August, five Aehr Test Systems insiders sold $11 million worth in one day, and every sale was the insider's own call, not a scheduled one, which we broke down here. The form itself gets a full explanation in our Form 4 guide.

When all three line up

The real payoff is the rare moment when all three point the same way. When a senator has bought a stock, a fund has added it in the same window, and an insider has bought it too, that overlap is a far stronger lead than any single filing on its own. It's exactly what our smart money scanner looks for.

A disclosure is a lead, not the whole story

Watching these groups is a way to start, not a reason to mirror a trade the day it shows up. By the time a 13F lands, it can be eleven weeks out of date. A senator's sale might be happening inside a blind trust that someone else runs on the member's behalf. An insider selling shares could be paying a tax bill or buying a house, not passing judgment on the company. What the filings give you is the what and the when. The why is left to you, and using them that way is the honest approach. Whatever edge exists comes from reading a filing sooner and asking a better question than everyone else. We dug into whether copying these groups actually beats the market in this piece, and into how the politicians themselves really perform in this one. Read the disclosure first, then put in the work.