DipSkip's Clone Trader feature lets you automatically mirror trades disclosed by
US politicians (House and Senate members), corporate insiders (officers, directors, 10%+ owners), and
institutional fund managers. This feature carries several risks beyond those of standard DipSkip
trading that you must understand before subscribing to any clone figure.
Clone Trader does not replicate the original trader's outcomes. Mirroring a
politician or insider does not mean you will make (or avoid) what they made. Their cost basis,
timing, holding period, tax treatment, and access to information are not yours.
Data Comes From Public Government Filings
DipSkip does not originate this data. We aggregate it from publicly available US
government sources, including:
- SEC EDGAR — Form 4 (insider transaction filings) and Form 13F (institutional holdings).
- U.S. House Clerk (clerk.house.gov) — Periodic Transaction Reports (PTRs) for House members.
- U.S. Senate eFD (efdsearch.senate.gov) — Periodic Transaction Reports for Senators.
We do not have any private feed, advance notice, or non-public relationship with any politician,
insider, fund, regulator, or filer. Every position we mirror was already public at the time we
ingested it. DipSkip is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any politician, insider,
fund, government agency, or filing source.
Snapshots Are Not Perfect
The portfolio snapshots, holdings, and transaction lists shown for any clone figure are our
best-effort reconstruction based on the filings available to us. They may be:
- Incomplete — a filing may be missing, embargoed, retracted, late, or not yet released by the source.
- Inaccurate — the source itself may contain errors, typos, wrong tickers, misclassified transactions, or amended filings that supersede earlier ones.
- Outdated — the filer's actual portfolio may have moved significantly between the trade date and the disclosure date.
- Misinterpreted — our pipeline must classify transaction types (purchase vs. grant vs. tax withholding vs. gift, etc.); we may classify them differently than you, the filer, or a different vendor would.
Parsing and Extraction Errors
Many filings — particularly congressional PTRs — are published as scanned or unstructured PDFs.
DipSkip validates extractions differently depending on the source format:
- For SEC Form 4 (structured XML): the filing is a structured XML document, so DipSkip parses the disclosed values directly from named fields and represents them exactly as filed. Every extracted transaction is run through automated deterministic checks (ticker format, date sanity, share/amount bounds).
- For House and Senate PTRs (LLM-based extraction from PDF): when a PTR's embedded text is missing or column-shredded and the model must read the PDF image directly — or when an extracted row is low-confidence — we run the extraction a second, independent time with a more conservative prompt and persist only the transactions that both passes confirm. Transactions reported by one pass but not the other are dropped silently — they do not result in a mirror trade. PTRs that parse cleanly from embedded text are extracted on a single pass. Every extracted transaction is additionally run through the deterministic checks above, and any transaction whose combined confidence falls below our threshold is held for manual review rather than auto-traded.
Where a second pass runs, it is meant to filter single-pass hallucinations by relying on
uncorrelated failures between the two prompts. It is not a guarantee. Both
passes can agree on the same wrong answer, especially when the underlying PDF is corrupt or
ambiguous, and a single-pass extraction carries the model's own first-read risk. The pipeline
can produce errors:
- Tickers may be misread (e.g., "MO" vs "MOH"), especially in low-quality scans, even when both passes agree.
- Dollar-range disclosures (how congressional PTRs report amounts) are converted to share counts using the current market price — the actual share count traded by the filer is not disclosed and is unknown.
- Transactions may be missed entirely if a filing is malformed, password-protected, image-only, or in an unexpected layout.
- On filings that get a second pass, a transaction the second pass omits as ambiguous will be dropped even if the first pass had it right — the trade-off for catching hallucinations is occasionally missing a legitimate disclosure.
If we detect an error after a trade has been mirrored, we cannot unwind the trade — orders sent to
your broker are final once filled.
Disclosure Lag
Mandatory disclosure rules do not require filers to report in real time:
- STOCK Act (Congress): politicians have up to 30 days from notification (and up to 45 days from the transaction) to file a PTR.
- SEC Form 4 (insiders): generally must be filed within 2 business days of the transaction.
- SEC Form 13F (institutional managers): filed quarterly, up to 45 days after quarter-end.
By the time DipSkip mirrors a trade, the underlying price, the filer's view of the position, and
the surrounding market context may all have changed materially. You are buying or selling
at today's price, not the price the filer paid. The filer may have already exited the
position by the time we see it.
Cost Basis and Fill Price Will Differ
Your cost basis on any cloned position will not match the filer's. Common reasons include:
- Many insider acquisitions are compensation events — restricted stock units, option exercises, or grants — where the insider's effective cost is well below market price (sometimes zero). You pay the full market price.
- You buy days or weeks after the filer, into a different market.
- Position sizing is scaled to your allocation, not theirs; ratios are approximate, not exact.
- For dollar-range PTR disclosures, you select low, midpoint, or high of the disclosed bracket — but the filer's actual amount is not knowable.
- Slippage, commissions, partial fills, and short-sale restrictions may further alter your execution.
You Are Responsible
- DipSkip does not recommend any clone figure or endorse following any individual's trading activity.
- Choosing to subscribe to a clone figure is your decision. DipSkip is not your investment adviser.
- Past trading activity by any figure — politician, insider, or fund — is not predictive of future results, and copying that activity is not a guarantee of any outcome.
- You should review the figure's filing history, the data-source disclosures on the subscribe form, and the most recent extracted filings before enabling auto-trade.
You assume all risk of inaccurate, missing, delayed, or misinterpreted public filing
data. DipSkip provides no warranty as to the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of any
snapshot or filing surfaced through the Clone Trader feature.