Public data, independence & corrections

1. Every trade comes directly from the government

All insider and congressional trade data on Whale Atlas is collected directly from the U.S. government, and from nowhere else:

• Insider trades: SEC Form 4 filings, retrieved from SEC EDGAR.
• Congressional trades: periodic transaction reports, retrieved from the Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives.

No trade data is ever obtained from, copied from, or checked against any other trade-tracking service. Whale Atlas does not scrape, log into, subscribe to or accept the terms of any such service. Supporting material is credited where shown: delayed reference prices come from a third-party market-data provider, charts are embedded from TradingView, company descriptions come from Wikipedia and Wikidata, and other public datasets are listed on the data sources page.

2. A verifiable record of where each record came from

For every source document it retrieves, Whale Atlas permanently keeps the government’s own identifier (for example, the SEC accession number), the exact time it was retrieved, the address it was retrieved from, and a SHA-256 fingerprint of the document exactly as the government served it. Every trade shown on the site is tied to one of these documents, and every trade links to the original filing so anyone can compare it with the government’s copy.

As of October 7, 2026, that record covers 181,178 documents retrieved from SEC EDGAR and 562 documents retrieved from the House Clerk, collected since September 22, 2026, each with its identifier, retrieval time and fingerprint.

3. Independently built

Whale Atlas’s software, data-processing methods, scoring rules, page design and written content were developed independently. They do not use code, text, designs, data or other materials from any other trade-tracking service. Where other services are mentioned (for example on the comparison page), they are named only to identify them, using facts from their own public pages.

4. The original filing is the authority

Whale Atlas reports what official filings say. Each record summarizes a public government filing, is attributed to its source, and links to it. If anything on Whale Atlas differs from the original filing, the original filing controls.

Anything that is not in the filing, such as the Signal Score, rankings, sort orders, totals and labels like “Large buys”, is Whale Atlas’s own experimental analysis, not a statement by the filer or the government. It makes no claim that any trade was improper or unlawful.

5. A free public-interest publication

Whale Atlas is a free news and information service that disseminates public filings to the general public. It has no subscriptions, paywall, advertising, sponsored content, affiliate links, donation requests or data sales. No one pays to appear on it, rank higher or be described on it, and it has no business relationship with any company, insider, member of Congress or trade-tracking service.

6. Lawful use of congressional disclosures

Federal law (5 U.S.C. § 13107) prohibits obtaining or using congressional financial disclosure reports for any unlawful purpose; for any commercial purpose, other than by news and communications media for dissemination to the general public; to determine or establish anyone’s credit rating; or, directly or indirectly, in the solicitation of money for any political, charitable or other purpose.

Whale Atlas uses these reports only to disseminate them to the general public, free of charge, with no advertising and no fundraising of any kind. It shows the reported value ranges exactly as disclosed, together with the filing and transaction dates. Our Terms of Use require visitors to respect the same restrictions.

7. Rule-following collection

Our software follows the SEC’s published EDGAR access rules. It identifies itself with a declared User-Agent that includes contact details, and stays within the SEC’s request-rate limits. It retrieves only public documents that the agencies publish for public access.

8. Data quality

Filings sometimes contain mistakes made by the filer, such as impossible prices, duplicated rows or amounts that do not add up. Whale Atlas automatically checks each insider transaction and leaves unverifiable values out of totals and rankings, while keeping the original filing visible and labeled. Congressional amounts are always shown as the disclosed ranges, never as exact values. The rules are published on the methodology page. Processing is automatic and can still make mistakes, so confirm important details in the linked filing.

9. Corrections

Real people are named in these filings, so accuracy comes first. If you believe something on Whale Atlas is wrong, such as a misread amount, the wrong person, the wrong date, or a purchase shown as a sale, send us the page address, what is wrong and, if possible, the original filing. We review every report within two business days and correct, clarify or remove anything we cannot confirm against the original filing.

For corrections, email [email protected].

10. Legal notices and complaints

If you have a concern about anything on Whale Atlas, legal or otherwise, please contact us in writing first. Tell us which page and content you mean, why you are concerned, and what you would like us to do. We review every good-faith notice promptly and respond in writing, and we would rather fix a genuine problem quickly than argue about it.

For legal notices and complaints, email [email protected].

Company names, ticker symbols and the names of people who file disclosures are used only to identify the public records they relate to. Whale Atlas is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any company, government body or service named on the site. All trademarks belong to their owners.

11. Policy history

• September 27, 2026: first published; source-record, independence and legal-notice sections added.

Every material change to our policies is listed here with its date.