How disclosure works.
Corporate insiders, members of Congress, federal judges and senior officials all have to report what they trade. They report on different forms, to different offices, on very different clocks — and the clock is the part that decides what the record can honestly tell you.
Four sets of rules, one record
Start with what this is not. Illegal insider trading means dealing on material information the public does not have. Everything on this page is the opposite: a set of statutes that force particular people to publish what they traded, on the theory that sunlight is cheaper than enforcement. The filings exist so that you can read them.
Four regimes overlap. They were written at different times for different reasons, which is why a corporate director reports in two days and a federal judge can take a year.
| Who | Covers | Deadline | Under |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corporate insiders | Officers, directors and holders of more than 10% of a registered class of equity. | End of the second business day after the transaction. | Securities Exchange Act §16(a), tightened to two days by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 §403 |
| Members of Congress | Senators and Representatives, plus certain senior staff, for their own accounts and those of a spouse or dependent child. | 30 days after being notified of the transaction, and in no case later than 45 days after it. | STOCK Act of 2012 §6, on top of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 |
| Federal judges | Article III judges and other officers covered by the judicial disclosure rules. | Periodic reports on a comparable 45-day outer limit; the annual report is due 15 May. | Ethics in Government Act of 1978, extended to periodic reporting and an online database by the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act of 2022 |
| Senior executive branch officials | Presidential appointees and other filers above the senior pay threshold. | 30 days after notice, and no later than 45 days after the transaction. | STOCK Act of 2012 §6, filed on OGE Form 278-T |
Each deadline is the outer limit, not the typical filing date
How long they get
A congressional or judicial periodic report has two clocks: 30 days from when the filer is notified of the transaction, and an outer limit of 45 days from the transaction itself. Notice is not the trade — a managed account can inform its owner weeks after the fact — so the 45-day limit is the one that binds.
Forty-five days is not a rounding error. Set against the quarter it lands in, the delay is large enough that a position can be opened, held and closed before it is ever reported, and the filing that finally appears describes a portfolio nobody holds any more.
The annual forms are worse, and in a way that is easy to miss: their deadlines run from the end of a reporting year rather than from the trade. A transaction early in that year waits out the whole year before the filing clock even starts. The table below measures each one from the transaction, which is the only measurement a reader can use.
| Form | Worst case, from the trade | As a share of a quarter | Where the clock actually starts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Form 4 | 2 days | 2% of a quarter | Two business days from the transaction, so a Thursday trade is public by Monday. |
| Periodic transaction report | 45 days | 49% of a quarter | Forty-five days from the transaction. The shorter 30-day clock starts at notice, which is not the trade date. |
| Form 5 | 410 days | 449% of a quarter | The deadline is 45 days after the issuer’s fiscal year end, so a transaction just after year start waits out the year first. |
| Annual disclosure report | 500 days | 548% of a quarter | A trade in January is covered by that year’s annual report, which is not due until 15 May the following year. |
Worst case measured from the transaction, not from the deadline · share of a quarter computed against 91.25 days · not a claim about typical practice
A range is not an amount
Form 4 states a share count and a price, so the value of a corporate insider's trade is arithmetic. The congressional, judicial and executive branch forms do not: the filer ticks a value band, and no more precise number exists anywhere behind it. Transactions at or below $1,000 need not be reported at all.
This matters because the bands widen fast. The lowest is fifteen times wider at the top than at the bottom; several of the upper ones are five times wider. A midpoint taken from one of those is not an estimate of anything — it is a number the filer never stated, presented with a precision the form cannot support. Where a value was filed as a band, we show the band.
| Band as filed | Width | Top ÷ bottom |
|---|---|---|
| $1,001 – $15,000 | $13,999 | 15.0× |
| $15,001 – $50,000 | $34,999 | 3.3× |
| $50,001 – $100,000 | $49,999 | 2.0× |
| $100,001 – $250,000 | $149,999 | 2.5× |
| $250,001 – $500,000 | $249,999 | 2.0× |
| $500,001 – $1,000,000 | $499,999 | 2.0× |
| $1,000,001 – $5,000,000 | $3,999,999 | 5.0× |
| $5,000,001 – $25,000,000 | $19,999,999 | 5.0× |
| $25,000,001 – $50,000,000 | $24,999,999 | 2.0× |
| Over $50,000,000 | unbounded | — |
Width and ratio computed from the band edges · for a spouse or dependent child, the higher bands are reported more coarsely still
What the letter means
Form 4 carries a transaction code, and collapsing it to buy-or-sell throws away most of what the filing said. Three of the codes below are not decisions to trade at all: a grant is compensation, a tax withholding is a disposition caused by receiving shares, and a gift moves stock without a price. Counting any of them as conviction — in either direction — is the most common way this data is misread.
Purchase
Open-market or private purchase. The closest thing on the form to a discretionary buy.
Sale
Open-market or private sale. Discretionary unless the plan checkbox says otherwise.
Award or grant
Shares or units received from the issuer as compensation. Not a purchase, and not a decision about price.
Option exercise
Exercise or conversion of a derivative security. Usually scheduled around an expiry, not a view.
Tax withholding
Shares withheld or delivered to pay the exercise price or the tax bill on a vesting. Files as a disposition; is not a sell decision.
Gift
A bona fide gift. No price, no proceeds, and often a transfer within a family or to a trust.
Conversion
Conversion of a derivative security into the underlying.
Disposition to the issuer
Shares returned to the company — a buyback tender or a forfeiture, not a market sale.
What a sale does not mean
An insider can schedule trades in advance under a Rule 10b5-1 plan, adopted at a time when they held no material non-public information. Sales then execute on a schedule the filer no longer controls, which is the entire point of the rule — and it means the date a plan sale prints has no relationship to what anyone thought that week.
Since the SEC's 2022 amendments, plans carry mandatory cooling-off periods before the first trade, and Form 4 carries a checkbox stating that a transaction was made under a plan intended to satisfy Rule 10b5-1(c). That checkbox is why we can mark a planned sale as planned rather than infer it: it is a filed fact. Where the box is ticked, the row says so.
Late is a fact, not an accusation
Every regime here has a deadline, so every filing is either inside it or outside it, and which one is a matter of arithmetic on two dates the filing itself supplies. Late filings are common enough to be unremarkable and are usually administrative — a custodian's notice arriving slowly, a form filed against the wrong account.
We report the gap and nothing more. A late filing on this site means the document arrived after the date the statute set; it does not mean the filer did anything improper, and we draw no such conclusion. Congressional late filings carry a nominal fee, and a company must disclose its insiders' late §16 filings in its annual proxy statement — so lateness is already part of the public record we are reading, not a score we invented.
Reading the record
Everything here comes from primary sources, and each row on this site links to the document it was read from rather than to our copy of it:
- Corporate insiders — Forms 3, 4 and 5 on SEC EDGAR, filed against both the issuer and the reporting person, so a filer's history is retrievable across companies.
- Members of Congress — the Clerk of the House and the Senate Office of Public Records. Many are scans rather than data; a document we cannot parse is marked unparsed rather than half-read.
- Federal judges — the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which has run an online database of judicial disclosures since the 2022 amendments.
- Executive branch officials — the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the agency ethics offices.
None of this is a recommendation, and none of it is evidence of wrongdoing by anyone who appears in it. It is a public record, reported as filed, with the dates left where they fall.
See it applied to the record.
Every disclosed trade, with the transaction code kept, the amount shown as it was filed, and both dates side by side.