Legal insider-trade tracker for retail investors

What to build

A mobile/web alert app for retail traders that aggregates Congressional stock trade disclosures (STOCK Act), SEC Form 4 insider filings, and lobbying records into one feed, pushing real-time notifications when a tracked politician or executive buys or sells a stock.

Three separate legally mandated disclosure streams can be merged into one real-time retail feed, but established competitors already dominate the exact niche.

Demand

Retail traders who already follow 'legal insider' signals want faster, more convenient access than manually checking SEC EDGAR or Congressional disclosure portals, and existing paid trackers prove they'll pay for it.

• Hacker News (coached.com essay: The insider trading you're allowed to do)Discussion

  67 points and 59 comments on Hacker News, indicating high engagement with the idea of tracking legally disclosed political and insider trading.

• Capitol Trades, Quiver Quantitative, Unusual WhalesProduct

  Multiple existing consumer products already track and monetize Congressional trade and insider Form 4 data, showing validated retail willingness to pay for this signal type.

Stack

• SEC EDGAR Form 4 API
• House/Senate financial disclosure data scrapers
• Senate/House Lobbying Disclosure Act database
• Supabase or Postgres
• Twilio or Telegram Bot API for alerts
• Next.js

Solo + AI difficulty

The data pipeline is the hard part: EDGAR Form 4 parsing is straightforward, but Congressional disclosures are often scanned PDFs requiring OCR/parsing, and lobbying records need cross-referencing logic; alerting and UI are easy with AI-assisted scaffolding. Realistic MVP (Form 4 + Congress trades only, lobbying as a stretch) is 3-5 weeks solo.

Entry threshold

All source data is free and public, so a solo builder can scrape it and ship a dashboard plus email or push alerts in a few weeks with AI coding help; the real barrier is differentiating from established players that already have an audience and a free tier.

Window

ongoing, no fixed deadline

Where to find first users

• r/wallstreetbets and r/stocks
• Product Hunt launch
• FinTwit (X) accounts following Capitol Trades/Unusual Whales
• Indie hacker and trading Discord communities

Competitors

• Capitol Trades
• Quiver Quantitative
• Unusual Whales

Counter-signals & risks

• The STOCK Act's 45-day disclosure window means Congressional trade data may already be stale by the time it's public, weakening the copy-trading value proposition.

• Established competitors (Capitol Trades, Quiver Quantitative, Unusual Whales) already have audience and data pipelines built, raising the bar for differentiation and user acquisition.

• Marketing a product around 'copying' politician or executive trades could draw regulatory scrutiny or be seen as implying investment advice, creating compliance risk.