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In the book Rule #1 by Phil Town, he explains that in general a large investor can take between 3 and 6 weeks to buy or sell a complete position. For example, Warren Buffett took several months (between March 4, 2022 and August 8, 2022) (https://www.dataroma.com/m/stock.php?sym=OXY) to buy his entire position in OXY. When we know this information, if we notice him in the month of May, we can buy stocks at the same time as him and just profit from the rise. My question is: How can we track the IN and OUT of these big players in REAL TIME? Phil Town explains that it's easy to get access to this information, but I have no idea how.

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    Completely away from the question, but if you want to profit from what Warren Buffet does, just buy Berkshire Hathaway shares.
    – glglgl
    Commented Sep 28, 2022 at 13:01
  • @glglgl Not sure that would track new transactions very well - BH has gotten so huge that it pretty much just tracks the S&P 500 (and actually underperforms a bit recently.
    – D Stanley
    Commented Sep 28, 2022 at 14:05
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    If you can profit from doing that, so can everyone else - which means all the profit is already taken.
    – void_ptr
    Commented Sep 28, 2022 at 20:46

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Impossible, for the simple reason that investment entities (even though he's a person, we can think of WB as an entity) generally don't face exchanges directly but rather through a broker.

So in a super simple example. WB decides to buy $100M in OXY. He doesn't go out to the NYSE directly but rather sends that order to a broker, or probably a number of brokers. WB has an account at those brokers, but so do many other entities. The broker goes out, executes their orders at the exchange and comes back to WB with $100M in OXY that will then be held in his name at custodian bank.

Even if you could somehow track the broker's trades at the exchange in real time (you can't, account information is obfuscated) you would never be able differentiate WB's orders through the broker from any of their other client's.

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Large shareholders of public companies (more than 5%) are required to file documents with the SEC when trading the company's stock (I'm not sure if it is done before or after trading). See here for some details.

These documents filed with the SEC are publicly available. As an example, Elon Musk was in the news earlier this year because he was late in filing one of these reports with the SEC.

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  • Yes, I know that already, but it would be nice to track them down in real time. Some website that can tell me ''Hey, Warren Buffett just bought 30,000 shares of AAPL'' for instance but for the best 45 investors.
    – J.Doe
    Commented Sep 28, 2022 at 12:39
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    If someone buys 5% or more of a company's shares, they have 10 days to report it to the SEC.
    – Bob Baerker
    Commented Sep 28, 2022 at 16:37
  • @BobBaerker But where can someone who does not work at the SEC see what trades were reported to the SEC? I think that's what OP actually wants to know.
    – Philipp
    Commented Oct 28, 2022 at 13:33
  • There are web sites that track insider trades. Google for info.
    – Bob Baerker
    Commented Oct 29, 2022 at 23:14

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