WallStPal publishes thousands of filings a week: insider trades, congressional trade reports, fund holdings, 5% stakes and more. Most readers care about a small slice of that. My Desk is the free account that gathers the slice you care about in one place and tells you when something new is filed.
This guide walks through each part of My Desk in the order most people set it up. It costs nothing, needs no card, and you can export or delete everything at any time.
Step 1: Create a free account
Go to the sign-in page and choose Create account. You need an email address, a username and a password of at least eight characters. Your username can be 3 to 24 letters, numbers, dots or underscores. Other readers never see your email.
There are two other ways in:
- Continue with Google, if you prefer not to make a new password.
- Email me a link instead. We send a link that signs you in without a password. If you don’t have a desk yet, the link creates one.
After you sign up, we send one email to confirm your address. Email alerts stay off until you click the link in it. If it doesn’t arrive, My Desk shows a banner with a button to send it again.
Step 2: Follow what you care about
The quickest way to fill your desk is the ☆ Follow button. It appears on pages for:
Press it once and the button changes to Following. The stock, person or fund now feeds your desk. Press it again to stop following. If you aren’t signed in yet, pressing Follow asks you to sign in or create a desk first.
A practical starting set: the stocks you own, your own representative and senators (use the ZIP code lookup on the Congress page), and two or three funds whose 13F filings interest you.
Step 3: Build your watchlist
Stocks you follow live on your Watchlist tab. You can also add a ticker directly by typing it into the box at the top, such as AAPL or NVDA, and pressing Follow.
The watchlist table shows each stock’s price, its change over three months and recent insider activity, and you can sort by any column. It is the fastest way to see which of your stocks had filings lately.
People, members of Congress, funds and sectors you follow appear on a separate Following tab.
Step 4: Add your portfolio (optional)
The Portfolio tab is for what you actually own. Enter a ticker, the number of shares and, if you want, your average cost per share. To add many at once, use Paste a list and type one holding per line, for example AAPL 10 150 for ten Apple shares bought at $150.
Once holdings are in, the desk shows:
- the total value at the latest weekly prices
- gain or loss, if you entered your cost
- the portfolio’s three-month change, weighted by value
- a breakdown by sector
- famous investors who own the same stocks
Only you can see your portfolio. It is never included when you share your watchlist. It shows what public filings say about the stocks you hold. It is not advice.
Step 5: Turn on alerts
Open the Alerts tab. There are two email options and one browser option.
Daily alert. On days something is filed for the stocks you follow or own, you get one email. Never more than one a day, and nothing on days with no news.
Friday summary. Once a week, on Friday, an email with everything new for what you follow, including people, members of Congress and funds.
Browser notifications. Below the email settings you can turn on notifications in the browser you are using. We send at most one notification a day, for new filings on the stocks on your list. You can also choose to be told about the day’s biggest insider purchase. Browser notifications don’t need email, and the same box has a button to send a test and to turn them off.
Email alerts need a confirmed email address (see Step 1).
Step 6: Save filters
The Saved filters tab lets you describe a kind of filing you want to watch across the whole site, not only the stocks you follow. Each filter has:
- a name you choose, such as “CEO buys over $1M in tech”
- a type: insider buys, insider sales, Congress buys, Congress sales, 5% stakes, trading plans, contracts or layoffs
- optional words to match, such as “CEO,” “Pelosi” or “Defense”
- an optional sector
Each time you visit, the desk shows how many new filings match each saved filter since you last opened it.
Step 7: Use the Overview and Activity tabs
Overview is the first screen you see. It shows how many new items have arrived since your last visit, how many things you follow, your portfolio value, the latest items for you and a seven-day count by type.
Activity is the full feed. Use the chips at the top to show or hide insider buys, insider sales, Congress buys, Congress sales, fund moves, 5% stakes, trading plans, contracts and layoffs. Tick Only new since my last visit to see just what changed.
Step 8: Share your watchlist
On the Watchlist tab, switch on Share my watchlist to get a link you can copy and send. Anyone with the link sees the stocks, people and funds you follow and your username. They never see your email, portfolio or notes. Switch it off and the link stops working.
Other tools on the desk
- Notes. Write private notes attached to a ticker, such as why you started following it.
- Learn. A reading list of WallStPal guides by category, with a checkbox for each one you’ve read and a progress ring.
- Account. Change your username or password, sign out on every device, download all your data as a JSON file, or delete your account. Deleting removes everything you saved and stops all emails.
Examples
Following a member of Congress. Suppose you had followed Representative Nancy Pelosi. On January 17, 2025, her office filed a periodic transaction report listing spouse purchases of call options on Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Vistra and Tempus AI, plus sales of Apple and Nvidia shares (House Clerk PDF). Once a report like that is on our Congress page, the trades appear in your Activity feed and in that week’s Friday summary. If you also follow Nvidia or own it in your portfolio, the daily alert covers it too. Our Pelosi guide explains how to read each line.
Following a fund. Suppose you followed Berkshire Hathaway. Its 13F filed on May 15, 2024 revealed a new stake of about 25.9 million Chubb shares, worth roughly $6.7 billion at the end of March, after the position had been kept confidential while Berkshire was buying (Kiplinger). A filing like that shows up as a fund move in your feed, and the quarter’s changes are listed on 13F changes. See following the Berkshire portfolio for how to read it.
Both examples carry the usual limits of the underlying data. Congressional reports can arrive up to 45 days after a trade, and 13Fs up to 45 days after the quarter ends. Alerts tell you when a filing is published, not when the trade happened.
Where the data comes from
My Desk does not create data of its own. Everything in your feed comes from public filings that WallStPal reads:
- insider trades from SEC Form 4 on EDGAR, shown on insiders
- fund holdings from SEC Form 13F, shown on funds
- 5% stakes from Schedules 13D and 13G, shown on stakes
- congressional trades from the House Clerk and the Senate eFD system, shown on Congress
Our method page explains how each source is read and how often it is updated.
Explain it like I’m 13
Imagine a giant library where new pages get added every day: who bought stocks, which funds changed their picks, what members of Congress traded. You don’t want to read all of it. You only care about a few things.
My Desk is like a backpack where you put the things you care about. You press “Follow” on a stock, a person or a fund, and it goes in the backpack. When a new page about any of them shows up, it lands in your backpack.
If you want, it can also send you an email that day, or a summary every Friday. You can even share a link so a friend can see what’s in your backpack, but never your money or your notes.
Questions about this guide? Pal reads it with you and answers in plain English.
WallStPal explains public filings. Nothing here is investment advice. Editorial policy · Corrections