Three Dashboards I Deleted

Two days ago I wrote about buying a stock into an FDA vote that the market had already spent three months pricing in. The lesson was about timing: information everyone can see, on a date everyone knows, is not an edge. This post is the same lesson pointed at my own tooling — because I had three dashboards guilty of exactly that, and I built every one of them myself.

What I built: 13F, Congress, and YouTube feeds

Over the past few weeks three feeds went onto my trading page, each one a genuinely fun engineering problem:

13F whale flows. Fourteen famous investment offices — Buffett, Ackman, Loeb, Coatue, Einhorn — parsed straight from SEC filings. Who bought what, who sold what, which names the most funds agreed on. Last quarter the tracked group sold a net $33.1 billion, with only 3 of 14 net buyers.

Congressional trades. Every stock transaction members of Congress are legally required to disclose: 3,798 trades from 149 members this year, scraped from House and Senate filing systems, priced at the midpoint of the disclosure ranges.

YouTube sentiment. The 25 biggest investing creators, their five most recent videos each, transcripts pulled and run through a finance sentiment model — 2,855 organic ticker mentions scored. The current read: “cautious, not euphoric.”

All three worked. All three were interesting to look at. And I never once opened them before placing a trade — which is the finding, not the confession.

The lag, measured: 122 days of staleness

Here is why. Every one of these feeds has a legally-mandated delay baked into it, and I finally measured mine instead of assuming.

Congress: the STOCK Act gives members up to 45 days to report. On my own dashboard the median gap between a trade happening and the filing appearing was 25 days — but that's only half the story, because filings then sit there and age. The median trade I was displaying had happened 122 days ago. One disclosure in my top 40 arrived 437 days after the trade.

13F funds: worse by design. A fund reports its holdings as of the last day of the quarter, and it has 45 days to do it. So a position established on January 2 shows up in a filing on May 15 — and it's a photograph of a moment already four and a half months gone. The fund may have sold the entire thing in April. Nothing requires them to tell you.

YouTube: no legal delay, but the subtler version of the same problem. Creators make videos about stocks that have already moved, because that's what gets views. Attention is downstream of price. A wall of Alphabet videos tells you Alphabet already did something interesting.

Alphabet: the same name at the top of every list

The three feeds converged on one stock, which turned the abstract argument into an arithmetic one.

Alphabet was the whales' single largest net purchase last quarter — $8.4 billion, held by 13 of the 14 offices I tracked, the most crowded position on the board. It was also the most-mentioned ticker on YouTube: 314 mentions across 21 of the 25 creators. If you wanted one stock that the smart money and the loud money both loved, this was it.

The whales bought it during Q1, when Alphabet traded around $287. Their filings became public on May 15, when it traded at $397. The information cost you a 38% markup before you could act on it. It now trades near $320 — meaning everyone who followed the smart money into the smart money's favorite stock is down about 19%, while the funds themselves are sitting on a gain.

They weren't wrong. You were just late, and being late is its own kind of wrong.

What if you’d just followed the 13F filings?

I ran the obvious test. Take the eight biggest disclosed buys and the seven biggest disclosed sells from the Q1 filings, buy the buys the day they went public, and see what happened.

The stocks these funds were selling outperformed the ones they were buying by almost seven percentage points in ten weeks. The buy basket lagged the S&P; the sell basket beat it handily. Visa, Mastercard, Chevron, Domino's — all disclosed sells, all up big. Alphabet, Broadcom, Uber — all disclosed buys, all down.

Congress told the same joke. Apple was their most-sold stock this year, across eight different sellers: it's up +11.7% since. Microsoft was their most-bought, across seven buyers: −6.6%.

The honest caveat, because it matters: this is fifteen stocks over one ten-week window, and one name (Alphabet, −19%) drags the buy basket down by itself. That is an anecdote, not evidence — if I published this as a finding I'd be doing the exact thing I criticize other people's dashboards for. The real argument here isn't the performance test. It's the calendar. The performance test just illustrates what the calendar predicts: by the time delayed information is public, the move that information describes has already happened.

What lagging market data is actually good for

Deleting the tabs isn't the same as saying the data is worthless. It's saying I had it in the wrong place, doing the wrong job. Lagging data is bad at “what should I buy today” and genuinely good at three other things:

Understanding what the market believes. Fourteen elite funds net-selling $33 billion is a real fact about positioning and risk appetite, even four months late. It's a weather report on consensus, not a forecast.

Research leads, not trades. If five different funds independently built a position in the same obscure name, that's a prompt to go read about the company — the start of work, not the end of it.

The contrarian read. The most useful signal in my whole 13F panel turned out to be crowding: Alphabet was the most agreed-upon position and the worst performer after disclosure. When everyone already owns it, the marginal buyer is you.

None of those are terminal features. They're a quarterly reading session. So that's where they're going.

What I deleted, what I kept

Three tabs are gone from the trading page, and it's now 24% lighter for it. What's left are the tabs that describe right now or next: live positions, the momentum scan, VWAP levels, crypto relative strength, the forward risk dashboard, and the horizon-scanning brief that looks for regulatory catalysts before they're priced.

The collection scripts still exist; the archives still exist. If I want to know what the whales did last quarter, I'll go read it — deliberately, once a quarter, like the research it is. It just no longer sits on the screen I look at to make decisions, wearing the visual costume of a live signal.

That costume is the real hazard. A dashboard implies currency. Charts imply actionability. Put four-month-old data behind a blinking interface and your brain will quietly file it under “things I know about the market today” — and that's how you end up buying Alphabet at $397 because somebody smart bought it at $287.

The data, preserved

Since the tabs are gone, here is the final snapshot of each feed, kept so this post stands on its own. The 13F numbers describe holdings as of March 31, 2026, filed in mid-May. The congressional figures are 2026 year-to-date through July 23. The YouTube pass ran July 24.

13F: fourteen offices, Q1 2026

Net flow is the change in disclosed U.S. equity holdings between filings, priced at quarter-end. Options and non-13F assets are excluded, so this is a partial view of any manager's book — Berkshire's insurance float and private holdings don't appear here.

Across the group: −$33.1B in net selling, with only 3 of 14 offices net buyers.

And the crowding measure — how many of the fourteen held the same name:

Congress: 3,798 trades, 149 members

Every transaction disclosed under the STOCK Act this year: 2,501 House and 1,297 Senate trades across 770 tickers, with $74.5M bought against $63.2M sold. Amounts are midpoints of the disclosure brackets, because members report ranges, not exact figures.

The largest individual disclosures, with the reporting delay on each — the column that made me delete the tab:

YouTube: 25 creators, 2,855 mentions

The five most recent long-form uploads from each of 25 investing channels, transcripts scored by a finance sentiment model across 1,787 ticker mentions. “Cross-creator read” is the consensus across the creators who discussed each name.

Common questions

How late are 13F filings?

Up to four and a half months. A fund reports the positions it held on the final day of a quarter, and it has 45 days after that quarter ends to file. A position opened on January 2, 2026 appeared in a filing dated May 15, 2026 — and the fund may have sold it in between without telling anyone.

How long do members of Congress have to report stock trades?

The STOCK Act requires disclosure within 45 days. In the 40 largest trades on my dashboard the median actual gap was 25 days, but the range was wide: one disclosure arrived 437 days after the trade. Because filings then sit and age, the median trade I was displaying had happened 122 days earlier.

Does copying 13F filings work?

Not as a timing tool. In the ten weeks after the Q1 2026 filings went public, the eight largest disclosed buys averaged −2.8% while the seven largest disclosed sells averaged +4.0% — the funds' castoffs beat their purchases by nearly seven points. That is one small sample over one window, not proof. The structural reason is more reliable than the anecdote: the price move that made a position attractive typically happens before you can see the position.

Is congressional trading data useful at all?

As research and as a measure of sentiment, yes. As a same-day trade signal, no — by the time a filing is public, the median trade is months old and the disclosure only gives you a dollar range, not a price.

Disclosure (NFA)

Not financial advice. I hold positions in ABT, HIMS, and HOOD, and I may buy or sell any of them without updating this post. Performance figures are from Alpaca SIP data through July 24, 2026; 13F and congressional data from SEC and House/Senate disclosure systems. This is a personal research journal — me showing my work, not recommending it.