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2026-08-23 The number that said "strong consensus" while everyone was selling
This week's Brief is an apology and a correction. Last Sunday one of our own headline numbers was wrong on three pages of this site, and it was wrong in the direction that flatters us — it made a stock look more loved than it was. I found it because the top of one page didn't match the table underneath it. Here is what broke, what it now says instead, and what else fell out of looking.
1. Taiwan Semiconductor was not the most-agreed-upon stock in anything
On the Innovation Edge page, TSMC sat at the top with 85% smart-money confidence and the label "Strong consensus". Underneath it, the same page listed the funds that hold it: nine of the fourteen we track in that strategy, none of which had added to the position, and seven of which had trimmed it. Those two things cannot both be true. The cause was dull and worth stating plainly: the confidence percentage was being calculated across all fifty investors we follow, then printed on a page about fourteen of them. TSMC is held broadly across the full fifty. Inside Innovation Edge it is held by nine funds that were mostly heading for the exit. The page was answering a question it wasn't asking. It now reads 52%, "Moderate — mixed signals", and sits seventh of ten rather than first. Every holding on every strategy page was overstated the same way — thirty of them, twenty-three by fifteen points or more, and never once in the other direction.
2. "Company insiders are buying" was a staff share scheme
Fund ownership alone can only carry a stock to 75% here. To be called a strong consensus it needs corroboration from Congress or from company insiders. TSMC had no congressional trades, so the last ten points came entirely from insider buying. Those purchases are real, public, and filed on SEC Form 4s — twenty-one of them by twenty people, thirteen vice presidents, six SVPs, an EVP and the chairman, between nine and 186 shares apiece, all on the same day in April, $80,497 in total across the lot. TSMC's own filing explains what they were: shares bought by the administrator of the company's Employee Stock Purchase Plan "pursuant to terms predetermined by the issuer". Nobody looked at the share price and decided anything. The site now reads those footnotes and ignores trades the filer had no discretion over. That cuts both ways, which is the point: of eight recent NVIDIA insider filings I checked by hand, four are sales made under a plan agreed months in advance, and those stop counting as a bearish signal too. They were never a signal either. There is also a floor now: eighty thousand dollars spread across twenty people is not insider conviction at a company of that size, and the honest output is no signal rather than a direction.
3. And six of the fifty investors weren't actually there
Checking the first two fixes turned up a third problem, and it is the one that bothers me most. The model was being scored over forty-four of the fifty investors it claims to track. Two of them had the wrong identifier: Dodge & Cox pointed at the mutual-fund company, which files a different form and has never filed a 13F at all, and Maverick Capital pointed at Lee Ainslie the individual rather than the firm he runs. The other four — Renaissance Technologies, Trian, ValueAct and Altimeter — file perfectly readable 13Fs that we were reading wrongly, opening the cover sheet instead of the table of holdings behind it. Renaissance alone is 3,184 positions that were silently missing every week. The fix is merged and takes effect with the next data refresh, which will move some of these numbers again. I would rather say that now than have you notice it yourself next Sunday.
4. What changed on the model
Genuinely very little, and after the week I've had I am not going to dress it up. The highest-conviction names are still Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet — the stocks the largest number of tracked managers hold at the same time. The scoreboard is unchanged: in the backtest the model beat the S&P 500 in 12 of 16 quarters, which means it lost in four. Everything above is a correction to how the site describes what the filings say, not a change in what they say.
2026-08-16 Two things we can now see that we couldn't last week
This week the Brief is about the site rather than the market, because two new things went live and both of them answer questions I've wanted to answer since I started this. One is about members of Congress trading in industries they help regulate. The other is about how long they take to tell anyone. Both are built entirely from public records, and both are free to read.
1. When Congress trades what it oversees
Members of Congress sit on committees that write the rules for particular industries, and they also buy and sell shares. Those two facts have always been public, but they live in different places, so nobody joins them up. We now do: 568 disclosed trades, by 44 members, across 16 committees, where someone traded a company in a sector their own committee oversees — about 3% of every disclosure we hold. The clearest example is a representative on the House Armed Services Committee who bought Lockheed Martin, RTX and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest defence contractors in the country, in three separate disclosures over the past year. A senator on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee bought Exxon and Chevron. None of this is illegal and none of it is an accusation: it is legal, it was properly disclosed, and trades are often directed by an adviser rather than the member. It is simply something you should be able to look up, and until now you couldn't.
2. The 45-day rule, and who ignores it
The STOCK Act gives members 45 days to disclose a trade. Most of the House clears that comfortably — the median delay across 13,131 disclosures is 28 days, and 88 of the 101 members we can measure are inside the deadline. The tail is where it gets strange. One former representative filed 566 disclosures and was late on 99% of them, with a typical delay of 343 days. Another averaged 471 days. The penalty for filing late is a $200 fee. You can now see every member ranked by how long they actually take, and I've been careful to explain on the page why senators are excluded: the Senate archive we can get doesn't publish a separate filing date, so including them would score all of them as flawless same-day filers, which would be false.
3. What changed on the model
Not much, which is the honest answer most weeks. The highest-confidence names are still Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft — the stocks the largest number of tracked managers hold at once. As a reminder of the scoreboard: in the backtest the model beat the S&P 500 in 12 of 16 quarters, which means it lost in 4. If a week is quiet, this section will say so rather than manufacture a reason to trade.
2026-08-03 Welcome to the Sunday Brief
This is the first edition of a new weekly ritual: three things the smart money actually did, in plain English, in under five minutes. No jargon, no hot takes — just what fifty of the world's best investors, members of Congress, and company insiders disclosed in public filings, and why it might matter to a normal person.
1. Where the conviction is
The model's highest-confidence names right now are Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft — the stocks the most tracked fund managers hold at the same time, with insider and congressional activity layered on top. That breadth is the whole idea: one famous investor can be wrong, but when a dozen disciplined ones independently hold the same business, that agreement is worth knowing about.
2. How we'll keep score
Every claim on the site traces to a public SEC filing, and the track record includes the losing quarters: in the backtest, the model beat the S&P 500 in 12 of 16 quarters — which means it lost to it in 4. You'll hear about both kinds here. If a week is quiet, the Brief will say it was quiet.
3. What to do with five minutes a week
Check the front page for the ranked list, glance at what changed since your last visit, and — if you're curious what following along would have looked like — try the Time Machine on the homepage. That's it. This is a weekly check-in, not a trading terminal.