Frequently Asked Questions

A 13F filing is a quarterly report required by the SEC from institutional investment managers who manage over $100 million in qualifying assets. It discloses their U.S. equity holdings, providing transparency into what stocks top hedge funds and superinvestors like Warren Buffett, Bill Ackman, and Seth Klarman are buying and selling. PaperPanda tracks 85 of these filers.

PaperPanda monitors SEC Form 4 filings in real-time, which corporate insiders (officers, directors, and 10% shareholders) must file within two business days of buying or selling their company's stock. The insider trading screener shows purchases and sales with dollar amounts, letting users filter by trade type, time period, and ticker.

Under the STOCK Act of 2012, U.S. senators and representatives must disclose stock trades within 45 days. PaperPanda tracks trading activity from 201 politicians (41 senators, 160 House members) across 2,034 stocks and over 30,000 reported trades, showing what Congress is buying and selling.

The Convergence Engine is PaperPanda's cross-reference tool that identifies stocks where multiple bullish or bearish signals fire simultaneously. It combines 5 signal sources — unusual options activity, insider purchases, congressional buys, short interest data, and superinvestor 13F additions — and ranks results by a weighted conviction score to surface the highest-conviction investment setups.

Unusual options activity occurs when the traded volume on an options contract exceeds 5 times its open interest, signaling that large institutional investors may be making significant directional bets. PaperPanda's options screener scans the S&P 500 and top superinvestor holdings during market hours, flagging contracts with high volume-to-open-interest ratios and estimating total premium spent.

Yes, PaperPanda is free and open-source. Core features including superinvestor fund tracking, insider trading data, congressional trades, retail sentiment, and market data are available without charge. The project is funded through optional community donations.

PaperPanda sources data exclusively from public, authoritative sources:

• SEC EDGAR for 13F filings and Form 4 insider trades
• Capitol Trades for congressional STOCK Act disclosures
• Tiingo for real-time IEX stock prices
• Tradier for options chains with ORATS greeks
• FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) for macroeconomic indicators
• Frankfurter for ECB foreign exchange reference rates
• FINRA for short interest data
• ApeWisdom for Reddit mention aggregation (r/wallstreetbets, r/stocks, r/investing)

PaperPanda tracks 85 superinvestor funds including Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Bill Ackman (Pershing Square), Michael Burry (Scion Asset Management), Ray Dalio (Bridgewater Associates), David Tepper (Appaloosa Management), and Seth Klarman (Baupost Group). These funds collectively manage hundreds of billions in assets and their 13F filings are updated quarterly via SEC EDGAR.

• 13F filings: Updated quarterly, within days of the SEC's 45-day filing deadline
• Insider trades (Form 4): Synced every 30 minutes from SEC EDGAR
• Congressional trades: Synced daily from STOCK Act disclosures
• Market data: Stock prices, options flow, and macroeconomic indicators refresh in real time or on 30-minute intervals

SEC Form 4 is a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission when a company insider — officer, director, or 10% beneficial owner — buys or sells shares in their own company. Under Section 16(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, insiders must file Form 4 within two business days of the transaction. PaperPanda monitors these filings in real time and flags notable purchases over $100,000 and sales over $1,000,000.

The Macro Dashboard tracks key indicators from FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) including GDP growth, CPI inflation, unemployment, consumer sentiment, industrial production, and retail sales. It also provides:

• Treasury yield curves with 2s10s spread tracking
• CBOE VIX volatility term structure and SKEW index
• Foreign exchange rates for major pairs (EUR, GBP, JPY, CNY)
• Earnings scorecard with EPS and revenue beat rates across S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100