Following congress stock trades is easy. Following them usefully is mostly a matter of not deceiving yourself about what you're looking at. This is the practical version: where the data comes from, how to read it, and the checks that separate a real observation from a screenshot.
1. Where the filings actually are
Members file Periodic Transaction Reports (PTRs) — one document per report, covering one or more transactions.
- House: the Clerk of the House publishes them as PDFs in a searchable disclosure system.
- Senate: the Secretary of the Senate runs an equivalent system.
Both are free and public. Neither is convenient: they're documents, not data. About a quarter of them are scanned images that no parser can read, which is why every tracker's coverage differs.
2. How to read one
A single transaction row gives you five things:
| Field | What it tells you | What it doesn't |
|---|---|---|
| Ticker | The security | Whether it's shares or options |
| Transaction date | When it happened | When you could know |
| Filing date | When it became public | — |
| Amount band | A range, e.g. $1,001 – $15,000 | The actual amount |
| Owner | Member, spouse, or dependent child | Who decided |
The band is the part people consistently misread. There are no exact amounts anywhere in this system, ever. And bands skew far smaller than the coverage implies: 73% of all disclosed congressional trades fall in the smallest band, $1,001 to $15,000.
The owner field matters just as much. On Nancy Pelosi's filings, for instance, 110 of 128 transactions are marked as her spouse's. Household-level disclosure means the member's name on the document is not a claim about who placed the trade.
3. The rule that decides everything
Under the STOCK Act, a member has 30 days from learning of a transaction to report it, and no more than 45 days from the transaction itself.
In practice, from 40,082 dated transactions:
- Median gap: 28 days
- One in five (19.8%): more than 45 days
- 8%: more than a year
So the mental model to hold is: you are reading history, and you don't know how old it is until you check. The full lag analysis has the distribution.
4. The four checks worth running
Before treating any congressional trade as interesting, run these. They take a minute and they kill most of the exciting-looking ones.
Check the gap. Subtract the transaction date from the filing date. If it's 200 days, you're looking at ancient history and the position may already be closed — the sale would be on a separate filing you haven't seen yet.
Check the band. If it says $1,001 – $15,000, you are looking at a trade that may be smaller than your own position. Conviction it is not.
Check the owner. Spouse or dependent child? Then the story you're building about committee access probably doesn't survive contact with the facts.
Check whether it's an option. Option purchases disclose no strike and no expiry, so they cannot be copied — only approximated by buying the shares, which strips out the leverage entirely. Corpus-wide that's only 1.6% of buys, but for some individual members it's a quarter to a third of everything they file.
5. Then measure it properly
The single most common mistake in this whole subject is computing returns from the transaction date. It produces spectacular numbers describing prices no member of the public was ever offered.
The honest calculation enters at the first price available after the filing became public. That's the earliest a real person could have acted, and it's the rule we use everywhere on this site.
The difference is not academic. When we ran that simulation across all 153 rankable members, 1 beat the S&P 500 and the median member trailed it by 230.1 points. Measured from the trade date, the same records look far better — and mean nothing.
6. A reasonable way to use the data
Given all of the above, the defensible uses are narrower than the hype:
- As an idea screen. A name appearing repeatedly across several members' filings is a prompt to go look at the company. It is not a trade.
- As a conflict-of-interest record. This is what the disclosure regime was actually built for, and it works.
- As a discipline test. If you can't articulate why a 28-day-old trade in a
$1,001–$15,000band from someone's spouse is a buy signal, you've learned something useful.
What it doesn't reliably provide is an edge you can trade. That's not cynicism — it's what the numbers say when you measure from the date the information existed.
Tools
- Congressional trade backtester — every member, entry on the disclosure date, fill counts shown beside every return, and the option to combine several members into one strategy.
- Email alerts when a member you follow files.
The fine print
Figures are from our own ingest of House and Senate disclosures as of August 2026 and will move as filings land. This is educational content, not investment advice.