Primary sources only.

Source provenance

Activist, insider, institutional, and market-structure data are pulled directly from their issuing authorities — not resold through aggregators.

• Schedule 13D / 13G filings — SEC EDGAR. Every activist beneficial-ownership disclosure plus all amendments. Item 4 ("Purpose"), percent_owned, and CUSIP extracted from the primary document body.
• Form 4 insider transactions — SEC EDGAR. Open-market purchases and sales by directors, officers, and ten-percent owners, including option exercises and awards.
• Form 13F-HR institutional holdings — SEC EDGAR. Quarterly position reports for a curated set of concentrated portfolio managers.
• Consolidated short interest — FINRA. Every settlement-date snapshot, all U.S.-listed equities.
• Commitment of Traders (Disaggregated) — CFTC. Weekly futures positioning across the regulated contract universe.
• Treasury auction results — U.S. Department of the Treasury. Bid-to-cover, dealer take, direct and indirect bid percentages, every auction.
• TIC foreign holdings of U.S. securities — U.S. Department of the Treasury. Monthly country-level holdings.
• Macro reference data — Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED). Yield curve, real yields, breakeven inflation, credit spreads, FX, commodities, Fed balance sheet.
• Sector employment — U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Sixteen series with full revision tracking.

Cross-referencing

Every activist filing on the live feed is joined to the other sources by issuer identifier — not by name match — so an enrichment carries the same authority as the underlying filing.

• Insider activity joins by issuer CIK against the trailing 12 months of Form 4 transactions.
• Institutional consensus joins by CUSIP, with a normalized-name fallback that strips entity suffixes (INC, CORP, PLC, LTD) but never internal sector words.
• Short interest joins by ticker symbol against the latest FINRA settlement snapshot.
• Multi-activist clustering counts distinct filers active on the same issuer in a rolling 90-day window.
• Filer history reports the same filer's activity across the rolling 90-day window.

Signal construction

The signals on the live feed and screener are deterministic joins over primary-source rows — no scores are estimated, interpolated, or fabricated. Where an input is missing, the signal simply doesn't fire.

• Insider join window — each activist filing is enriched with Form 4 transactions on the same issuer within the trailing 90 days; the insider-cluster signal requires 3+ distinct insiders buying within a rolling window (90 days by default, caller-configurable from 7 to 365); the three-factor signal joins legs within a ±window of the filing date (90 days by default).
• Open-market purchases only — buy-side insider signals count transaction code P (open-market purchase) exclusively. Option exercises, awards, and gifts are displayed but never counted as conviction buying.
• CIK-based self-exclusion — an activist's own Form 4s (and affiliated entities, matched by filer CIK and name-token rules) are excluded from the insider legs, so a filer buying through an affiliate never inflates its own signal.
• Multi-activist clustering — counts distinct filers active on the same issuer in a rolling 90-day window, joined by issuer CIK.

Analyst briefs

Each filing carries a one-to-two-sentence analyst brief and an intent classification across seven defined categories: passive, strategic, M&A arbitrage, board change, capital structure, distressed, and unclear. Each brief reads the filing's primary-source language directly and returns a structured assessment with a stated confidence level. Briefs never paraphrase filings as fact and never displace primary-source language; the raw filing remains one click away.

Refresh cadence

• 13D / 13G filings — daily, with within-the-hour latency on filings published during U.S. trading hours.
• Form 4 insider transactions — every six hours.
• Macro reference data (FRED, Treasury, CoinGecko) — daily.
• FINRA short interest — every settlement.
• 13F holdings — quarterly, on the SEC publication schedule.
• CFTC COT — weekly.
• BLS employment — monthly with revision capture.

Editorial standards

• Every quantitative claim on the site links to its primary source.
• Where source-level coverage is incomplete, we display the gap rather than estimate.
• 13D Watch publishes research; it is not a registered investment adviser, and nothing on the site is investment advice.