Every filer on record

Files is which law required the report, and it decides what every column after it can mean. A member of Congress files a Periodic Transaction Report of trades made. An investment manager files a 13F stating what the firm held on the last day of a quarter. A company insider files a Form 3, 4 or 5 within two business days of trading in a company they are an officer, director or large shareholder of. None of the three can be derived from either of the others.

Reports is every filing on record for that person, including the ones published as scans. Transactions counts only the lines that could be read, so the two disagree for anybody who files on paper. Where a person has reports and no readable line, this shows a dash rather than a zero: the record exists and this product cannot read it, which is not the same as not trading.

A manager shows a dash under Transactions for an entirely different reason: a 13F never reports a trade, only what was held on one day, and this product will not subtract one quarter from the next to invent the trades between. Nothing is being withheld there; the figure does not exist.

Companies is a floor rather than a total in all three cases, but it is not matched to the same standard, and the difference is worth knowing before comparing one number to another.

For a member of Congress it counts only companies matched with confidence. A disclosure naming a bond, a fund or something not listed on an exchange has no company to match, and an uncertain match is left out rather than counted. A manager names each security by CUSIP instead, which this product matches to a ticker and records as probable, the best a CUSIP pairing supports, so that figure counts the probable ones and a CUSIP it could not match is dropped rather than guessed at. For an insider there is nothing to match at all: the filing names the company itself, so that figure counts every company they have filed for, including any whose documents are still queued.

Last disclosed is when the report was filed, not when the trade happened. Members have 45 days to report and a manager has 45 days after the quarter ends, so for both the two dates are routinely weeks apart. An insider has two business days, which is why theirs are close together.