How it works

WhaleWatch collects public, official data every morning and turns it into one clear report. Here is exactly what we collect, how, and what we deliberately don't do.

1. Insider purchases (SEC Form 4)

Company directors, officers and shareholders owning more than 10% must report their trades to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) within two business days, on Form 4. We read every Form 4 filed on the SEC EDGAR system and keep only open-market purchases (transaction code "P") - an insider paying their own money for shares at the market price. We leave out option exercises, grants, gifts and sales, because they say little about an insider's own decision to buy.

• Daily report: purchases of $100,000 or more.
• Ticker pages and history: purchases of $10,000 or more since 2016.
• Holdings change: how much the insider increased their stake with this purchase.
• Every row links to the original filing so you can check it yourself.

2. Company size

Every purchase is labelled Large (public float $2B+), Mid ($300M - $2B) or Small (under $300M). Public float is the market value of shares held by the public, as reported on the cover of the company's latest annual report (10-K) to the SEC. Where a filing reports the float in the wrong unit (for example thousands of dollars twice), we check it against shares outstanding and the price insiders paid.

3. Cluster buys

A cluster buy is when two or more different insiders buy shares of the same company within 14 days. We detect these automatically from the filings.

4. Company events (SEC Form 8-K)

Listed companies must report major events within four business days on Form 8-K. Each filing lists standard "item" codes, which we use to sort events into red flags (bankruptcy, delisting notice, unreliable past financials, auditor change, cyber incident…), deals (major agreements, completed takeovers), leadership changes, financing and results. A completed takeover also triggers a delisting notice - we classify it as a deal, not a red flag.

5. Crypto money-flow radar

Stablecoin supply (DefiLlama), futures open interest and funding on major exchanges, bitcoin held by public companies, prices and distance from all-time highs (CoinGecko) and the Fear & Greed index (alternative.me). We use only large, established exchanges for futures data.

6. News

Headlines from established outlets (via RSS), sorted by topic and de-duplicated. We show the headline and link to the original article - we never copy articles.

7. Charts

Price charts are provided by TradingView. The "Where insiders bought" chart is drawn only from prices reported in SEC filings (as paid, not adjusted for later splits).

What we don't do

• No recommendations. We report what happened. We never tell you what to buy or sell, and nothing on this site is investment advice.
• No rumors and no non-public information. Only official filings and published data.
• No cherry-picking. When we publish statistics about past insider purchases, we include all of them - the ones that went up and the ones that went down.

Timing

The daily report is built automatically every Tuesday to Saturday morning (Central European Time) from filings published up to the previous evening. US markets are closed and the SEC accepts no filings on weekends, so there is no report on Sunday and Monday - instead, a weekly summary of the whole trading week comes out every Sunday. Crypto data is collected with every report. SEC filings can be corrected later (amendments); we use the original filings.