What Congress disclosed — and what copying it would have returned
Members of the US Congress have to report their stock trades, and the filings are public. The part almost nobody mentions is the part that decides whether any of it is worth acting on: you cannot trade when they traded. You find out when the filing lands, up to 45 days later.
So every number here starts from the disclosure date, not the trade date. The backtest buys at the first opening price after a filing became public, because that is the earliest any real person could have acted on it. It is the less flattering way to run the numbers, and it is the only one that tells you what following a member would actually have done for you — rather than what the member got at a price you were never offered.
Loading the ranking…
Why the disclosure lag is the whole story
Under the STOCK Act, a member has 30 to 45 days to report a trade. In practice the median gap between the trade and its disclosure is around 26 days, and roughly one filing in ten arrives late. A headline that says a member made 60% on a position is describing a return that started at a price no copier could reach.
That is why the ranking above is a copy-returnrather than the member’s own return, and why the two are different numbers — usually worse, sometimes much worse. It is the only version of the question that means anything to somebody deciding whether to follow along.
Follow a member, and hear about it the day they file
A backtest tells you how someone’s past disclosures would have treated you. The half that matters going forward is not missing the next one — and a filing is only useful in the days after it appears, which is exactly when nobody is watching the House Clerk’s website.
So the ranking and the alerts are one product rather than two. Follow any member in Pulse and you get an email as soon as a new filing of theirs is parsed: the trades in it, both dates, and how long they sat on it — “traded Jul 2, disclosed Aug 9, 38 days later”. The same disclosure date the backtest would have bought on is the one that triggers the email, so what you get alerted to is the thing you just tested.
What a disclosure actually contains
A periodic transaction report gives the member, the ticker, whether it was a purchase or a sale, the trade date, the filing date, and an amount band— “$1,001–$15,000” and so on, up to “over $1M”. The law never requires an exact figure. Nobody can tell you what a member actually put in, and any site that quotes a precise position size is filling in a blank the filing left empty. Trades by spouses and dependent children are covered too, and are included here.
Because sizes are unknowable, the ranking sizes every position the same way — a fixed percentage of the portfolio — so the comparison between members is about which trades they disclosed, not about a position size invented for them.
Where the data comes from
Almost all of it is read straight from the primary source: the House Clerk’s disclosure archive and the Senate’s electronic filing system, refreshed daily, going back to 2012 — the year the STOCK Act made these reports a requirement. Electronically filed reports are parsed; the ones filed on paper are scans, and a scan is skipped and counted — coverage here is a number we can show you rather than a silent gap.
The exception, stated because it is the kind of thing sites leave out: a small share of older filings exist only as those paper scans, and for those we fall back to two public volunteer-transcribed datasets. That is roughly 2% of filings, every one of them tagged “mirror” in the feed, and our own read of a document always wins where we have one.
What this is not
It is not a signal service and not advice. A member filing a purchase tells you what they bought and when it became public; it tells you nothing about why, and nothing about what happens next. Members leave office, stop trading, or file in late batches. Past disclosures are a record, not a forecast — and the numbers here ignore taxes and any cost beyond the modelled fees.
Go further
Inside Pulse: the full ranking with sorting, the fixed-horizon comparison that separates picking from exit timing, per-member backtests where you set the position size and the exit rule — and the follow-and-get-emailed loop above, so the members you decide are worth watching reach you the day they file rather than whenever you next remember to look.
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