A telegram bot that notifies you when a US congress critter makes a trade on the stock market at https://t.me/stonkcritter or with personal subscriptions via @stonkcritter_bot

Please note this does not index or tell you who has what stocks, only what stock trades have happened when they are disclosed. For that, visit the terrific sites from which this bot gets it's updates:

• https://housestockwatcher.com
• https://senatestockwatcher.com

If you have any questions about the data this bot puts out and what it means, you'll probably want to check those sites. For issues about the bot itself, create an issue.

This was done as part of the Level1Techs Devember competition. Check them out at https://level1techs.com/ or https://www.youtube.com/c/level1techs

This is running on a Linode server using the Level1Techs coupon: https://linode.com/level1techs

• broadcast messages to a Telegram Channel whenever a congress critter makes a trade
• subscribe to specific stock tickers to see which congress critters are trading that stock
• subscribe to a specific congress critter to see what trades they make
• save the cursor to stop sending the same messages if the service restarts
• get the direct message chat working
• follow multiple tickers with a single /follow message
• allow following specific asset types (e.g. stock options, crypto or futures)

You can use the bot passively, just by joining the following channel, which will message about every single stock trade a congress critter does.

You can use the bot actively, by messaging the bot directly, it's name is @stonkcritter_bot. Simply write /help to the bot and it will tell you what you can do, but the main things to do are to follow congress critters or stock tickers (by prefixing a $ to the symbol). Try the following:

/follow $MSFT
/follow $TSLA
/follow Nancy Pelosi

You can write /list at any time to see who you're following, with links to unfollow.

The messages show the congress critters name, what the trade was (purchase/sale etc as an emoji), the ticker and how much money was involved (as an emoji). It also shows the date the transaction occured and the money figure range. In most cases, the disclosure date will be the same day that you recieve the message in Telegram.

These are the types that come out of the disclosure data:

These are the trade values that come out of the disclosure data:

Probably stick to the officially hosted bot, unless this repo becomes stale/unresponsive, in case we cause too much traffic for the websites host the source data.

You'll need to set the cursor manually to start with, this will stop it dumping all disclosures ever:

$ stonkcritter -x 2021-10-30
2021/12/11 00:46:46 parsed cursor time as 2021-10-30 00:00:00 +0000 UTC
2021/12/11 00:46:46 updated cursor to 2021-10-30 (2021-10-30 00:00:00 +0000 UTC)

Or in the installed environment:

sudo -iu stonkcritter stonkcritter -x 2021-10-30 -d /home/stonkcritter/data

You could also do this when the bot is started by hitting the API endpoint:

curl -X PUT http://localhost:8090/cursor/2021-10-21

You will need to set the token and channel ID via BOT_TOKEN and BOT_CHANNEL. In the installed environment this is found in /etc/default/stonkcritter:

BOT_TOKEN=<bot_token>
BOT_CHANNEL=<channel_id>

The default channel is included in the package but obviously only the bot with the correct token can post to that.

You can dry run by not specifying the -chat arg:

stonkcritter

That will log all disclosures to the terminal instead of broadcasting.

Start and enable the bot on boot:

systemctl enable stonkcritter
systemctl start stonkcritter

You can also run it from command line:

BOT_TOKEN=xxx BOT_CHANNEL=xxx stonkcritter -chat

Omitting BOT_CHANNEL or setting it to empty, will cause the bot not to broadcast disclosures to channel.

A local API is running on port 8090 with the following endpoints:

• GET http://127.0.0.1:8090/reps - all known reps
• PUT http://127.0.0.1:8090/disclosures?cursor=xx - push a new disclosures file in and set the cursor
• POST http://127.0.0.1:8090/pull_from_s3 - download disclosures from S3

You can run the following commands to call these on the running API on the same system:

$ stockcritter -pull
$ stockcritter -loadfile <filename.json> [-x <2021-10-30>]