TheBuyList.com is a nice, simple website with just one purpose: to show you if mutual funds are trading the stocks you’re tracking.

Just enter a ticker and click a button. You’ll be shown a table of “recent” transactions of that stock made by “the top rated mutual funds”. The table shows you how many shares were bought or sold, the name and ticker of the fund, and the general “family” of fund.

The same information can be found on sites such as Morningstar.com, but then you’ll have to pay high $100+ subscription fees for the privilege. TheBuyList is currently completely free, with just some tasteful and non-intrusive Amazon ads on the pages.

The one thing the site lacks which I would love revolves around those terms “recent” and “top rated mutual fund”. It’s not clear when the transactions shown were made or if all transactions are shown. And so it can be hard to infer trends from the data. But then that’s like getting a free Volkswagen and complaining that it’s not a BMW. I asked the site’s owners if they could show more accurate date data on the site, and this was their response:

The exact date of the transaction per fund is pretty hard to extract… We are working on it. We do process the data a couple of times per week and I believe that the transactions are pretty recent. The date of the update is shown on the main screen. We also maintain historical transactions every time we update the database, but right now we only display the data as of the latest update. As the portal section is fully built, there will be more features such as the capability to add stocks to a watch list to receive emails when there’s a transaction on those.

I do see a form on the current site allowing you to receive updates by email. This would be a good way to track the updates. You’ll know that the transactions have happened at least since your last update or so. And you’ll also have a historical record of the transactions to look at since TheBuyList is currently showing just the most recent transactions on the website.

TheBuyList is a great resource for some data you might not have had access to before. Use it to fight to good fight.