13F & Congressional Filing Terms
A 13F and a congressional Periodic Transaction Report are both government-mandated disclosures of trading activity, filed on a delay and read for what changed rather than for the raw snapshot alone. The seven terms below cover the mechanics common to both: how a position's status gets classified quarter over quarter, how much the filing itself withholds by design, and how long a real trade sits unseen before the public gets to read about it.
New position
A new position is a stock a fund reported holding this quarter that it didn't hold in the previous quarter's 13F. Nothing in between the two filings tells you when inside that quarter the fund actually bought, only that the position exists at quarter end and didn't before. Among the four ways a 13F filing can change, a new position is generally read as the clearest buying signal, since there's no ambiguity about direction the way there can be with a fund simply trimming or adding to something it already owned. The catch is timing. A position reported as new in this quarter's filing could have been bought on the first day of the quarter or the last, and the filing itself doesn't distinguish between the two, so the entry price implied by 13F data alone is only ever a rough range.
Closed position
A closed position is the mirror case: a stock the fund held last quarter that drops to zero shares in this quarter's filing, meaning the fund exited the position entirely rather than simply trimming it. Read alongside new positions, closed positions are the clearest selling signal 13F data offers, since a partial reduction leaves open the possibility a fund is still bullish but rebalancing, while a full exit doesn't. As with new positions, the filing only shows the state at quarter end. It doesn't say whether the fund sold gradually across the quarter or all at once near the deadline, and it says nothing about the price the fund actually realized on the way out.
Increased / decreased position
An increased or decreased position describes a fund adding to or trimming a holding it already had, without fully entering or exiting it. These changes sit in between new and closed positions on the conviction scale: a fund adding to an existing bet reads as bullish, and one trimming reads as bearish, but neither is as unambiguous as opening or closing a position outright, since a large fund might trim purely to manage position sizing or rebalance a portfolio rather than because its view has changed. Percentage change from the prior quarter is the number worth watching here more than the raw share count, since a small increase to an already-massive position means something different than the same percentage increase to a fund's newest, smallest holding.
45-day lag
The 45-day lag is the reporting delay built into every 13F filing: managers have up to 45 days after a quarter ends to disclose their holdings as of that quarter's last day. That means the freshest 13F data available at any moment is already six to seven weeks old by the time it's public, describing where a fund stood at a single point in the past rather than where it stands today. A position reported unchanged across two straight quarters could reflect genuine steady conviction, or it could just mean nothing has changed in the 45-day gap on either side of the snapshot. The lag is also why 13F data works better as a slow-moving trend to track across quarters than as a timely signal to react to.
Amount range
Congressional trade disclosures don't report an exact dollar figure. Instead, the STOCK Act requires a bracketed amount range, for example $15,001 to $50,000, wide enough that two trades reported in the same bracket could differ by tens of thousands of dollars in actual size. The ranges get wider as trade size grows too, so a filing in the $1 million to $5 million bracket carries much more size uncertainty than one in the $1,001 to $15,000 bracket. Reading a single filing's amount range in isolation tells you roughly how large the trade was, not precisely, and comparing two members' trades by bracket alone can understate or overstate how different their actual position sizes really were.
Party-direction color coding
To make a feed of hundreds of congressional trades scannable at a glance, OpticAlpha colors each row by party and direction together rather than either alone: blue for a Democrat buy, violet for a Democrat sell, green for a Republican buy, and red for a Republican sell. The convention lets a pattern, like a cluster of one color appearing around the same committee or the same sector, stand out visually without reading every row's text. It's a display convention only. The color itself carries no information beyond party and direction; it doesn't grade the trade's size, timing, or how it relates to the member's committee assignments, all of which still need to be read from the row's own details.
Filing lag
Filing lag is the gap between when a member of Congress actually makes a trade and when that trade becomes public under the STOCK Act, legally capped at 45 days but frequently shorter, since many filings land well before the deadline. The lag matters because it sets a floor on how current any congressional trading signal can be: even a same-day filing means the market has already had a full trading session to react to whatever news might have prompted the trade, and a filing that lands near the 45-day limit means weeks have passed. It's the congressional-trading equivalent of the 45-day lag built into 13F rules, just measured against an individual trade instead of a quarterly snapshot.
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