Questions & answers

Everything is parsed directly from official government sources: SEC EDGAR (Form 4, Form 144, 13F, 13D/G, XBRL financials, 8-K), congressional STOCK Act disclosures, USASpending federal contracts, FEC committee filings, CFPB complaints and NRC reactor data. No third-party resellers, no analyst estimates — if we can't compute it from a filing or a price series, we don't show it.

Form 4 insider trades are polled from EDGAR continuously and appear within minutes of acceptance. 13F fund holdings load per filing the day they are filed — not on the SEC's quarterly bulk schedule. Congressional trades follow the STOCK Act's own cadence: members have up to 45 days to disclose, so that lag is the law's, not ours.

Our price history covers active U.S.-listed tickers from 2005. Delisted names drop out of the price set, which flatters any backtest run only on today's tickers — our backtest pages say this survivorship caveat explicitly instead of hiding it.

Since the SEC's 2023 rule, Form 4 filings carry a checkbox marking trades made under a pre-scheduled 10b5-1 plan. A scheduled sale says little; a discretionary trade says more. We show the flag on filings from August 2026 onward — older filings are marked unknown rather than guessed.

Three or more distinct insiders buying the same stock inside the window shown on the card. Multiple independent wallets agreeing is the setup most cited in the academic literature on insider trades.

Traded naively, no. Our own backtest over tens of thousands of events shows a negative edge against size-matched benchmarks, and we publish that result on the Backtest page. The signal is an input, not a strategy.

Point-in-time honesty: pick a past date and the fundamentals table shows only what had been FILED by that date — later restatements excluded. Most sites backtest against today's cleaned-up data, which quietly inflates results; we built the whole database so it can't.

Usually a definition, not an error. Example: we count only real purchases (Form 4 code P) as insider buying and report option exercises and conversions separately — sites that fold those in show a bigger number for the same company. Where a comparison matters, the page says what is counted.

Yes — everything you can see today is free: all datasets, the screener, company pages, the backtester and the watchlist (up to 10 tickers). If paid tiers ever ship they will add speed and convenience on top; nothing that is free today gets taken away.

Monthly dollar-cost averaging on dividend-adjusted total-return prices from 2005, benchmarked against the identical cash flows in SPY. The method — including what it does NOT model — is written on the page itself.

The JSON endpoints that power the site are open at reasonable rate limits, and CSV export requires a free sign-in. A formal keyed API is on the roadmap; nothing is sold yet.

No. WaveMan surfaces public filings and computed statistics. Nothing on the platform is a recommendation to buy or sell anything.