How we read the filings.
The Filing Post is built on top of four public-record sources. Everything on the site — every number, every Convergence Card, every Row — is derived from one of them. This page lists which sources, how we treat each one, and what we don’t yet do.
SEC Form 13F — institutional manager holdings
Quarterly position snapshots filed by institutional managers with $100M+ in U.S. exchange-listed equity holdings. We ingest the holdings table from each 13F-HR filing on EDGAR and link it to the manager’s entity. Trailing-12-month return on a 13F portfolio is computed by share-weighting the manager’s quarter-end positions against quarter-end adjusted-close prices and chain-linking the quarterly returns. SPY is the benchmark.
SEC Form 4 — insider trades
Per-transaction filings by officers, directors, and 10%+ owners of a public company. We split rows by transaction code — P (open-market buy) and S (open-market sell) drive the buy/sell sentiment; M (option exercises), A (grants), and F (tax-withhold sales) are excluded from sentiment because they don’t reflect a directional bet. “Insider clusters” means ≥ 3 distinct insider entities buying the same symbol with code P inside a rolling 30-day window.
SEC Schedule 13D / 13G — activist positions
Beneficial-ownership disclosures filed when an entity crosses the 5% ownership threshold in a public company. 13D signals active intent to influence; 13G is passive. We treat 13D/G as ownership disclosures, not trades — the rows carry no buy/sell direction.
STOCK Act — congressional periodic transaction reports
Per-transaction reports filed by sitting members of Congress within 30 to 45 days of a trade. Amounts are reported as ranges ($1K–$15K, $15K–$50K, etc.) under the STOCK Act — we render them as ranges, never as a single fabricated value. The simulated Congress portfolio metric is a $1,000-per-trade buy-and-hold over a trailing 24-month window, with per-trade contribution capped at +500% and OTC sentinel prices (sub-$1 entry) excluded.
Filings land in one of two tables: trade events (Form 4, STOCK Act PTR) and holdings (13F, 13D/G). The feed UNION-merges them when both are needed. STOCK Act filings often emit one row per owner (Self / Spouse / Joint / Undisclosed); we collapse those to one row per logical trade. Ticker columns show the issuer; the filer’s name comes from the linked entity record.
Symbol-level aggregates (“most-held by institutional managers,” “tracked-companies” counts) are precomputed from the underlying tables on a daily cron, not at request time. The data refreshes when the ingest pipeline lands new filings.
Manager leaderboards use a deliberate selectivity floor: positions_total ≥ 100 and coverage_weight ≥ 0.9. The first excludes single-holding VC residuals filing 13Fs; the second guarantees we can price ≥ 90% of the portfolio at the relevant quarter-end. Genuine concentrated long-only books are excluded as a trade-off — for a leaderboard the filter is right.
Congress leaderboards filter to members with ≥ 5 distinct symbols traded inside the 24-month window. The filter excludes single-bet luck. Highly-concentrated small-dollar portfolios that meet the filter can still legitimately compute over +100% — that’s real math on real STOCK Act trades, not a defect.
- Pattern Engine. Convergence detection (the cross-source pattern that surfaces when three institutional managers and two senators buy the same name) is not yet online. Cards reading
data-pending="pattern-engine"are placeholders for the data, not invented examples. - 13F shares column. The
unitsfield on the current 13F snapshot is mis-populated upstream. Company-page holder tables suppress the shares column until the ingest is corrected. - 13F lag. 13F filings are due 45 days after quarter-end, so the “current” institutional snapshot trails by up to that interval. Form 4 and STOCK Act PTRs land within days; 13D/G inside ten days of crossing 5%.
- STOCK Act amount precision. Members of Congress report amounts as ranges, not exact figures. Aggregate-volume numbers on Congress pages use the range endpoints (min / max), shown as a range, never reduced to a fictional point estimate.
Every detail page links the original filing on SEC EDGAR or CapitolTrades. If a figure on The Filing Post disagrees with the source filing, the source filing wins — tell us at hello@thefilingpost.com and we’ll fix it.