Methodology: how Tracked Money collects and computes its data

Last updated 25 September 2026

Every record Tracked Money shows comes from a public filing, and links back to it. This page describes how each source is collected, how often, how filings are matched to ticker symbols, and when a return is published or withheld. The upstream sources, with links, are listed under data sources.

Congress: House periodic transaction reports

The Clerk of the House publishes a yearly index of every financial disclosure, refreshed daily. Tracked Money reads the periodic transaction reports (PTRs) from it, downloads each electronically filed PDF, extracts the text, and uses a language model to turn that text into one row per transaction (asset, owner, type, trade date, amount range). Paper filings, which are scanned images, are skipped. Checked every weekday at 08:00 and 17:00 UTC. Members must report within 45 days of a trade.

Congress: Senate periodic transaction reports

Tracked Money reads electronically filed PTRs from the Senate's Electronic Financial Disclosure (eFD) site and parses each report's transaction table. Paper filings are skipped. Checked every weekday at 07:30 UTC. The Senate site only answers requests from US networks, so Senate coverage depends on where the collector runs; the status page shows whether it is current.

Executive branch: OGE Form 278-T

The Office of Government Ethics lists officials' reports in a public index. Tracked Money reads the 278-T reports OGE posts directly as PDFs. Reports OGE releases only on a signed written request (Form 201) are not included. Each PDF is read with text recognition (many are scans), so rows can be misread; each row keeps a link to its source report. The date shown as filed is the day OGE posted the report, the first day anyone could read it. Checked every weekday at 14:00 UTC.

Corporate insiders: SEC Form 4

New Form 4 filings are found through EDGAR full-text search every two hours. Tracked Money reads the filing's XML: the insider's name and role from the filing itself, the non-derivative transactions, and whether the filing says the trade was made under a Rule 10b5-1 plan. Form 4s are due within two business days of the trade.

Activist and 5%+ holders: Schedule 13D

Since December 2024 the SEC receives 13Ds as structured XML: percent of class, shares, event date and stated purpose are fields. An original 13D means the holder crossed 5% and is shown as accumulation. An amendment is compared with the same holder's previous stake in the same company: up is shown as a buy, down as a sale, and anything unknown or unchanged as "other", never a guessed direction. Checked four times each weekday.

Institutions: Form 13F

Tracked Money follows a curated list of large managers, not every 13F filer. For each, it reads the latest quarterly 13F-HR information table and compares it with the previous quarter. A new position, or a holding whose share count rose by at least 25%, becomes a signal. 13Fs are due 45 days after each quarter ends and show long US equity positions on one date only. Checked on Mondays.

Options blocks

After each US close (weekdays, 21:30 UTC) Tracked Money reads end-of-day option chains for tickers its other sources track and records blocks too large to be an ordinary hedge (by default at least 250 contracts and $1 million in premium, expiring in 2 to 120 days). A public chain has no trade tape, so the direction of a block is inferred, from where the last print sits between bid and ask or from its structure (a deep in-the-money put block is almost always written, not bought). Where neither read is clear the direction is shown as unknown. Each block is settled on its expiry date.

Update cadence

Matching filings to tickers

Form 4 and 13D filings identify the company by its SEC number (CIK), which is matched to a ticker through the SEC's own company list. Congressional and OGE reports name an asset in words ("PALANTIR TECHNOLOGIES INC CL A"). Both that name and the SEC's company names are reduced to the same key (case, accents, abbreviations and legal or share-class suffixes normalised) and only an exact match, or an unambiguous match on a long name, is accepted. A wrong ticker on a named person's trade is worse than none, so a row that cannot be matched is kept under the name as filed and is left out of prices and charts.

Prices, returns and when a return is withheld

• Prices are daily closes from Yahoo Finance, an unofficial source.
• Returns are total returns: splits are adjusted for and dividends are counted as reinvested (Yahoo's adjusted close), for the filer and for the S&P 500 alike. Every price series is refreshed nightly, so a split restates the whole history rather than appearing as a gain or a loss.
• Options trades are listed but not priced: the data has the stock's price, not the contract's, and the stock's move is not the option's. They are left out of every return.
• A politician or official with no filing for 12 months, or a fund whose latest 13F is more than two quarters old, has stopped reporting, so we cannot know what they hold. Their record ends at the last filing and is shown as "Last filed" with the month and year (for example "Last filed Dec 2018"), with no one-year or year-to-date figure.
• A filer's return answers one question: if you had put an equal amount into every disclosed purchase on its trade date and held each until a disclosed sale, what would that portfolio have done? Positions are equal-weighted because filings give amount ranges, not exact sizes. It is compared with the S&P 500 over the same days.
• A strategy built from people (Fast Filers, Congress Tracker, Congress Sells, Executive Branch, Insider Buys, Cluster Buys) counts each member equally: its daily return is the average of its members' own daily returns, over the members holding priced positions that day, so a member who files fifty trades moves it no more than one who files five. A member joins at their first buy and leaves when their positions are sold or they stop filing. A strategy built from signals (Confluence, High Conviction, Committee Conflicts, Leveraged Bets and the like) counts each trade equally.
• This is not a return anyone could have earned: most trades become public weeks after they happen.
• A return is published only when at least 70% of a filer's dated buy and sell filings can be matched to a ticker and priced. Below that, the page says the return is withheld and shows the coverage instead.

Which filers are featured

Ranked: at least 3 priced buys. A filer takes a place in a ranking only when their published return rests on at least three purchases we could price, so one lucky trade cannot top a list. Filers with fewer keep their page and are listed as too few trades to rank.

In the app, every filer with a published return is shown, losses included, in red. Rankings list only filers with at least three priced buys, so a single trade cannot top or bottom a list; shorter records still appear on the filer's page and under "Too few trades to rank". The hand-picked Featured row shows filers who are up, and a featured filer needs enough priced history and a portrait. An official's web page is published when their filings clear a content bar (at least six rows), whatever their return.

What we do not do

• We do not estimate exact amounts. Congressional and OGE reports give ranges, and we show the range filed.
• We do not claim to know why anyone traded, and we do not treat a disclosure as evidence of wrongdoing.
• We do not fill gaps: a filing we could not read is listed as unread, not guessed.
• We do not accept payment to include, rank or leave out any filer or filing.
• We do not give personal investment recommendations.

Found an error? See corrections.