Are congressional stock trades public?

Yes. Under the 2012 STOCK Act, members of the U.S. Congress must publicly disclose stock transactions within 45 days. Several free sites publish this data, and it can be pulled programmatically into an automation that emails you when a politician files a new trade.

What is a 13F filing?

A 13F is a quarterly report that institutional investment managers with over $100M in assets must file with the SEC, disclosing their U.S. equity holdings. It's how you see what hedge funds like Berkshire, Bridgewater, or Scion bought and sold. 13F data is free from the SEC EDGAR system.

Do I need a paid data service to track this?

No. Both 13F filings (SEC EDGAR) and congressional trades (STOCK Act disclosures) are public and free. An n8n workflow can fetch, filter, and email them to you daily without any paid market-data subscription.

Is following whale and politician trades a good strategy?

It's a signal, not a strategy. 13F data is up to 45 days old and congressional disclosures lag too, so you're never first. It's useful for idea generation and spotting conviction, not for timing. This is informational only and not financial advice.

Track Hedge Fund & Congress Stock Trades Automatically (n8n Template, 2026)

The big money leaves a paper trail. Hedge funds reveal their U.S. holdings every quarter in 13F filings, and members of Congress must disclose their personal trades within 45 days under the STOCK Act. Both data sets are public and free — the problem is they're buried in clunky government systems and you'd have to check them by hand.

The fix is a small automation that does the checking for you and emails you a clean daily digest. Here's exactly how it works, and how to set one up.

The 30-second version

13F holdings come from the SEC's EDGAR system — free, no key required. You pick the funds you care about (Berkshire, Scion, Bridgewater, whoever) and pull their latest filings.
Congressional trades come from STOCK Act disclosures, republished by several free trackers. You filter for the names you want to watch.
A scheduled n8n workflow fetches both once a day, formats the new entries, and emails you a digest. No paid market-data subscription anywhere in the chain.

Why people track this

Not because it's a crystal ball — it isn't. 13F data is up to 45 days stale and congressional filings lag too, so you're never trading first. What it's genuinely good for: idea generation and spotting conviction. When a fund that rarely moves takes a big new position, or several politicians pile into the same name, that's a thread worth pulling. You still do your own homework. (To be clear: this is informational only — not financial advice, and I'm not a licensed advisor.)

How the workflow is built

The whole thing is four moving parts, and you can wire it in an afternoon:

Trigger: a schedule node that fires once a day (say 9am, before the open).
Fetch: two HTTP requests — one to SEC EDGAR for the 13F holdings of your watch-list funds, one to a free congressional-trades source for politician filings.
Filter + format: a Code node that keeps only entries newer than your last run, deduplicates, and shapes them into a tidy table.
Deliver: a Gmail (or SMTP) node that emails you the digest — ticker, who, buy/sell, size, filing date.

Everything runs on free public data and your own infrastructure, so the marginal cost per day is effectively zero. If you're new to n8n, it's the most flexible of the big automation tools — see n8n vs Zapier vs Make for why it wins for this kind of data job.

Skip the build: the Whale Watch template

I run a version of exactly this. If you'd rather not wire it from scratch, I packaged it as an import-and-go n8n template — the Whale Watch workflow tracks 13F whales plus congressional trades and emails you a daily digest. You import the JSON, add your own email + (optional) keys, and it runs.

Get the Whale Watch template — $29 →

Instant download, import-ready, per-buyer license. Browse the rest of the n8n template shop while you're there — there's a free-to-cheap range from $9.

What you'll need

An n8n instance (self-hosted is cheapest; cloud works too).
A Gmail or SMTP credential for delivery.
A few minutes to pick your watch-list of funds and politicians.

Bottom line

The data the "smart money" files is already public — you just need something to read it for you every morning. A scheduled n8n workflow turns two messy government databases into a one-glance email. Build it yourself with the outline above, or grab the Whale Watch template and skip to the good part.

Track hedge fund & congress stock trades automatically