knowable / README.md
jwlutz's picture
card, license and attribution for release 2026-08-01
13d90ac verified
|
Raw
History Blame Contribute Delete
9.35 kB
metadata
pretty_name: 'knowable: US financial disclosures with a publication clock'
language:
  - en
license: other
license_name: knowable-data-terms
license_link: LICENSE
annotations_creators:
  - found
  - machine-generated
source_datasets:
  - original
size_categories:
  - 10M<n<100M
tags:
  - finance
  - tabular
  - timeseries
  - sec
  - edgar
  - form-4
  - 13f
  - congress
  - insider-trading
  - point-in-time
  - public-domain
  - us-government
  - open-government-data
configs:
  - config_name: congress_trades
    default: true
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: releases/2026-08-01/congress_trades/*.parquet
  - config_name: house_filings
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: releases/2026-08-01/house_filings/*.parquet
  - config_name: senate_filings
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: releases/2026-08-01/senate_filings/*.parquet
  - config_name: fund_holdings
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: releases/2026-08-01/fund_holdings/*.parquet
  - config_name: insider_transactions
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: releases/2026-08-01/insider_transactions/*.parquet
  - config_name: coverage
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: releases/2026-08-01/coverage/*.parquet

knowable

US government financial disclosures as a point-in-time dataset: congressional trades, SEC Form 4 insider transactions, and 13F fund holdings. Every row carries the instant it actually became public and a measured coverage denominator.

35,213,599 rows. 602 Parquet partitions. 958 MB zstd. Release 2026-08-01.

Immutable: corrections ship as a new release naming this one in supersedes, never as a rewrite of these bytes.

Access

from datasets import load_dataset

trades = load_dataset("jwlutz/knowable", "congress_trades", split="train")

Query without downloading everything, which is what you want at 34M rows:

import duckdb

duckdb.sql("""
    SELECT filer_name, ticker, side, amount_range_low, published_at
    FROM 'hf://datasets/jwlutz/knowable/releases/2026-08-01/congress_trades/*.parquet'
    WHERE ticker = 'NVDA' AND published_at <= '2026-01-01'
    ORDER BY published_at DESC
""")

Configs: congress_trades, house_filings, senate_filings, fund_holdings, insider_transactions, coverage.

Point-in-time queries

This is the reason to use this dataset rather than a scraped one. published_at is when the filing became readable: not when the trade happened, not when we fetched it. Filtering on it reconstructs what was knowable at a past instant.

-- exactly what a reader could have known on 2024-06-30, nothing later
SELECT * FROM congress_trades WHERE published_at <= TIMESTAMP '2024-06-30 23:59:59'

Do not use transaction_date for this. The median trade is disclosed 28 days after it happens and 18.7% take longer than the statutory 45 days, so transaction_date <= T silently includes filings nobody could read at T.

Candella SDK

from candella import knowable

trades = knowable.congress_trades(since="2026-01-01", ticker="NVDA")

The SDK wraps the HTTP contract below, so an SDK query and a direct API query return identical rows.

Status: the read API is not hosted yet. The FastAPI app and a client both exist and are tested against real release bytes, but no public endpoint serves them today. Use the Parquet paths above until that lands. The contract, so you can write against it now:

GET /v1/{resource}?cursor=&limit=&as_of=
    -> {"data": [...], "next_cursor": str|null, "as_of": timestamp}

resources: congress/trades, house/filings, senate/filings,
           insider/transactions, fund/holdings, coverage

as_of applies the point-in-time bound server-side. Paging is keyed on (published_at, id), so a cursor stays valid across releases.

What it covers

table rows one row is
fund_holdings 34,030,485 one 13F position line
insider_transactions 1,067,193 one Form 4 transaction line, all codes
congress_trades 72,140 one disclosed trade (House 55,796, Senate 16,344)
house_filings 41,380 one House filing with its publication clock
senate_filings 2,394 one Senate eFD document with its clock
coverage 7 one source-period with its measured denominator

Congressional transactions span 2012 to present; House publication clocks reach back to 2008-03-26. The SEC lanes cover 2024-01 through 2026-07, and every statistic you compute from them inherits that boundary.

Coverage, against each source's own denominator

This table ships inside the release as coverage, so incompleteness is queryable rather than a claim in a README.

source captured expected coverage known gap
sec_form4 462,659 464,209 99.7% 1,550
sec_13f_hr 86,123 86,124 100.0% 1
house_clerk 41,380 41,454 99.8% 74
senate_efd (documents) 2,394 2,394 100.0% 217
senate_efd_ptr (transcribed) 1,791 2,394 74.8% 603
house_clerk_ptr (our parse) 5,407 8,306 65.1% 2,899
house_clerk_ptr_congresskit (fill) 372 2,899 12.8% 2,527

Read the two House PTR rows together: 5,779 of 8,306 documents, 69.6%. That is the weakest number here and it is not averaged away. The missing 2,527 are 2,437 paper filings that exist only as scanned images plus 90 e-filed documents no public archive holds. Denominators come from the publisher's own index, never from our own output.

Two scope caveats that change how a number reads:

  • senate_efd expected counts elected filers only. The all-filer Senate PTR total is 11,830, so 1,791 transcribed is 74.8% of elected-filer PTRs but 15.1% of all Senate PTRs.
  • The 217 gap on senate_efd is a floor. Third-party mirrors hold 217 elected-filer documents that eFD's six-year retention dropped from its index, so the historical denominator is strictly larger than 2,394 and its true size is unmeasured.

Speed and reliability

Publication clock precision

precision share of congress_trades meaning
exact 88.4% (63,803) a real second, from the publisher
date_only 11.6% (8,337) the source gave a date and no time

house_filings is 100% exact, back to 2008. The vocabulary is exactly three values, exact / first_seen / date_only, and a row is never promoted to a precision its source does not support. Midnight is not a time we observed, so a date_only row says so rather than presenting 00:00:00 as an instant.

House clocks come from the clerk's own HTTP Last-Modified header. Senate exact clocks come from bisecting eFD's submitted_end_date bound, which accepts one-second granularity and so reads back the publisher's stored second. eFD states no timezone: America/New_York is inferred from the filing-hour distribution and corroborated against an independent 2020 scrape on 969 of 969 documents. That inference travels in extraction_notes on every row it affects.

Disclosure latency

Transaction date to publication instant, over 72,135 congressional trades:

p50 p75 p90 p99 within statutory 45 days
28 days 40 days 204 days 819 days 81.3%

Newest filing in this release published 2026-07-29.

Integrity

  • Every partition carries a sha256 in the manifest, verified at publish time by reading hashes back from the Hub rather than trusting the upload succeeded.
  • Releases are immutable; partitions are never rewritten.
  • The build refuses rather than warns. A dangling foreign key, an unregistered parser version, a duplicate primary key, or a provider absent from the redistribution allowlist each abort the build before anything is written.
  • 17 data expectations run over the real corpus on every build.

Source errors are carried, not silently repaired

63 of 72,140 rows (0.118%) carry a transaction_date after their own publication instant, which is physically impossible. They are filer typos: years written as 3031, 2202, 2220. They ship as filed. Normalization reads the source's vocabulary; it does not repair the source. Filter transaction_date <= published_at if you need them gone.

Exclusions are handled the same way. 24,196 rows extracted by OCR from scanned paper filings are deliberately absent from this release because their field accuracy has not been human-adjudicated.

Licence and citation

Code is Apache-2.0. The data carries no licence, because it is not ours to license. These are US government records and facts are not copyrightable (Feist v. Rural Telephone). We assert no copyright and grant none. See LICENSE for the full statement and ATTRIBUTION.md for upstream credits.

A statutory restriction binds you regardless of anything we say. 5 U.S.C. 13107(c)(1) prohibits obtaining or using these reports for any unlawful purpose, for commercial credit rating, for solicitation, or to determine or establish credit rating. That is federal law, channel-independent, and not ours to waive.

@misc{knowable2026,
  title  = {knowable: US government financial disclosures with a publication clock},
  author = {Lutz, Jack},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Release 2026-08-01},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/jwlutz/knowable}
}