Build a Hedge Fund Portfolio Tracker with Python and SEC EDGAR Data

Want to know what Warren Buffett is buying? Or what Citadel just dumped from their portfolio? Every institutional investor managing more than $100 million is required to file a 13F form with the SEC every quarter, disclosing their equity holdings. This data is completely public — but working with EDGAR's raw filings is a nightmare. In this tutorial, we'll build a Python tool that tracks institutional holdings programmatically. The Problem with Raw EDGAR Data If you've ever tried to pull data from SEC EDGAR , you know the pain: CIK numbers instead of company names Inconsistent XML/SGML formats across different filings Rate limiting (10 requests per second) No clean API — just raw filing documents We'll skip all of that by using the SEC EDGAR Financial Data API which handles the parsing and gives us clean JSON responses. Setup Get your API key from RapidAPI (free tier: 100 requests/month), then: pip install requests tabulate Step 1: Search for an Institutional Investor import requests RA