Disclosures

Not investment advice

Tickertail publishes impersonal, informational analysis of public records: the trades and holdings that politicians, corporate insiders, and large funds are legally required to disclose. The same content goes to every reader on the same footing, on a general and regular basis: every filing to everyone, and one further view, the stocks trail, to every signed-in reader. Nothing is tailored to any person, and nothing is timed to promote any particular transaction. We know nothing about your financial situation, objectives, or risk tolerance, and nothing on this site takes them into account.

Tickertail is not a broker-dealer, investment adviser, or fiduciary, and is not registered with the SEC, FINRA, or any other financial regulator. Nothing on the site is a recommendation or solicitation to buy, sell, or hold any security, and no score, grade, or analysis should be read as one. A high Signal Score means a filing is unusual and worth reading about; it does not mean you should trade.

Past performance does not predict future results. The returns we show are historical and descriptive, shown with the disclosure delay or the reporting period beside them, and say nothing about what any stock will do next. Investing involves risk, including the loss of the money you put in. For decisions about your money, talk to a licensed professional who actually knows your situation.

Data sources and accuracy

Every figure about a real company, person or fund derives from official public filings and end-of-day market prices. The example stock shown on the locked trail of the Stocks page is made up, and is labelled as made-up where it is shown. The five feeds, and how fast the law requires each to arrive:

Three properties of the source data worth knowing. First, the lag: congressional filings can legally arrive up to 45 days after the trade, and every card shows that gap rather than hiding it. Second, ranges: congressional filings state dollar ranges, not exact amounts; where we need a single number we use the range midpoint (see what the numbers mean). Third, amendments: filers correct and amend filings, and when they do, the record changes after we first reported it.

We publish what the filing says, when it says it. Every card that shows a real disclosure links to its source filing so you can check our reading against the official record. Tickertail processes filings automatically and at volume; despite the verification checks that run before numbers ship, occasional errors are possible, and the content is provided as-is. Our commitment is prompt, visible correction (the corrections policy), not a warranty of perfection.

Corrections

When we get something wrong, we correct the record promptly. Our commitment on how: corrections get dated and shown on the affected card or page rather than silently overwritten, and material errors get a note in the next brief.

Filers also amend their own filings, which is related but different. When a filing states that a transaction was restated or withdrawn, we act on it rather than counting that transaction twice. A House Periodic Transaction Report marks every row New, Amended or Deleted; we read that column, and the row a later filing replaced stops counting in every count, total, average and ranking on the site. Where the amendment restates a figure, the corrected figure counts in its place; where the filing withdraws the trade, nothing does. On a member's own page the replaced row is still shown, labeled as amended, so a revision stays visible instead of quietly vanishing. Amended 13F filings supersede the originals the same way.

Two limits remain, and both err toward showing you a duplicate rather than hiding a real trade. First, a House amendment is linked to the row it replaces only where that link is unambiguous; where the filing does not identify what it corrects clearly enough, both rows stay. Second, two feeds have no amendment handling yet: an amended Senate eFD filing still appears alongside the original rather than replacing it, and amended insider filings (Form 4/A) are not yet imported. Wherever a duplicate survives, the source filing linked on each card is the ground truth.

To report an error: [a corrections address (corrections@ on the production domain) will be published here once the mail domain is live]

How we use AI

AI at Tickertail writes prose, never numbers. Where a summary or desk take is drafted by AI, two promises govern it:

• Anything AI-written is labeled as AI-written in the product, until an editor reviews and approves it.
• The math is never AI-generated. Every number about a real company, person or fund (scores, returns, ranges, benchmarks) is computed from filings and end-of-day prices by regular, deterministic code. AI drafts sentences; it never produces figures, scores, or recommendations. The example stock on the locked stocks trail is a fixed, made-up illustration, labelled as made-up where it is shown, with no real company, person, fund or price in it.

Much of the card text is not written by anyone at all: it is assembled from each filing's structured fields by that same deterministic code, so the same filing always produces the same words. AI-drafted passages can still misstate a detail; that is exactly why every summary links to its source filing. When in doubt, trust the filing over the summary, and tell us via the corrections policy so we can fix it.

What the numbers mean

• Where a figure starts.From the day the filing became public (what a reader could actually have seen), or from the day or period the filing names: the trade day for Congress, the price and day on the Form 4 for an insider, the quarter for a fund. Figures from a day use that day's closing price; an insider figure can start from the price stated on the Form 4; a fund's figures start from the quarter's lowest, average and highest daily close, and all three are shown. A figure that starts before the filing was public describes how the stock moved, not what the filer made.
• Disclosure-date convention. Whenever we describe what following a disclosure would have returned, the clock starts the day the filing became public, never the trade date you could not have known about. Figures that start earlier are shown beside it, each labelled as a price a reader could not have paid or acted on.
• Range midpoints. Congressional filings disclose dollar ranges, not exact amounts. Where a single dollar figure is needed, we use the midpoint of the disclosed range.
• The benchmark.Wherever a return is compared to the market, the comparison is the S&P 500 over the same days. For a quarter's average it is the S&P 500's average over the same days of that quarter. On a stocks trail card, where the S&P 500 has no close on record for the day a figure starts from, the comparison is left out. Elsewhere the last S&P 500 close on or before that day is used.
• Sector, industry and themes.These are ours, not the filing’s. No disclosure says what a company does, so we classify each listed stock into one sector, one industry and up to four themes, and a stock we cannot place is left blank rather than guessed at. They organise the site; they are not facts from a filing, and no number on the site is computed from them.
• Cost of the delay.The stock's move from the close on the filer's trade date minus its move from the disclosure date, in percentage points: what the legally permitted reporting lag cost a reader.

How to read the scores built on these definitions (the Signal Score and the CAT Scan), and a live back-test of the Signal Score against realized returns, are on the methodology page. The exact weights and formulas behind the scores are proprietary; the definitions above, the sources, and the back-test are public, so every printed number has a public meaning even though the recipe is ours.

Conflicts of interest

Coverage cannot be bought or suppressed: no politician, insider, issuer, or fund pays to appear on Tickertail or to be removed from it, and we accept no compensation from anyone we cover.

A fund's or company's name and logo appear only to identify the filer whose public record is shown. Those marks belong to their owners, who are not affiliated with Tickertail and do not endorse it.

[staff trading policy: an owner decision is pending on whether operator staff may trade securities covered by the site; the policy will be published here before paid subscriptions open]

Company logos

Like a name, a logo is here only to identify the company whose public record is shown (see conflicts of interest). A company without one shows its ticker instead. Two sets are in use, because a page and a list need different shapes.

Stock pages show the company’s wordmark, from Wikimedia Commons. A wordmark appears only after its Commons file and licence record pass our checks. Most of those files are marked public domain on Commons; the ones listed below are shared under Creative Commons licences that ask for a credit, which is given here. Each is shown as a thumbnail that Commons renders, resized to fit the page.

The Stocks board shows a small square mark instead, because a wordmark is unreadable at the size a row allows. Those come from two public collections of exchange logos: ticker-logos and a Nasdaq symbol directory. Neither collection licenses the trademarks in it, and neither could: a mark belongs to its owner, and appears here for identification only. We drop a mark whose symbol has since changed hands, and we hold the provenance of every one we show in public/logos/icons.json.