How to track congressional stock trades
Members of Congress must disclose trades over $1,000 — but the law allows up to 45 days. Where the filings live, and why the delay is sometimes the story.
Under the STOCK Act of 2012, members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children must publicly disclose securities transactions over $1,000 in a Periodic Transaction Report (PTR).
The filings are free and public. Two separate systems, because the chambers run their own.
Where the filings are
Senate — Electronic Financial Disclosure (eFD) Search by senator name, then filter to Periodic Transaction Reports.
House — Clerk of the House disclosure search Search by representative, filing year, and type.
Both are searchable without an account.
What a PTR actually contains
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Asset | The security traded, usually with its ticker |
| Transaction type | Purchase, sale, or exchange |
| Date | When the trade occurred |
| Amount | A range, not a figure — $1,001–$15,000, $15,001–$50,000, and so on |
| Owner | Whether the filer, spouse, or dependent child |
The amount is always a bracket. You cannot know the exact size of a congressional trade from a PTR, only its band. Anyone publishing a precise dollar figure has estimated it, and should say so.
The 45-day rule — and why the lag is the story
A PTR must be filed within 30 days of learning of a transaction, and no later than 45 days after it occurred.
So every disclosure is, by design, historical. You are never seeing a trade as it happens.
Which makes the filing date versus the transaction date worth as much attention as the trade itself. A report filed on day 44 of a 45-day window, for a trade placed days before a public announcement in the member’s own committee jurisdiction, is a documented sequence of dates. Late filings — past the deadline entirely — carry a penalty that is famously small, and the lateness is a matter of record.
Reading it fairly
This subject attracts partisan framing, and the framing is usually the least interesting part. The disclosure is the story: who traded what, when, when they told us, and what was happening in their committee that month.
Several things a PTR does not establish: that a trade was directed by the member rather than an adviser, that it was informed by anything non-public, or that it was profitable. Many members hold blind trusts or managed accounts. The document records a transaction, not a motive.
Aggregators
Several services collate these filings into browsable form — Capitol Trades, Quiver Quantitative, and Unusual Whales among them. They are useful for discovery and for spotting patterns across members.
For anything you intend to rely on, go back to the primary document. Aggregators parse thousands of PDFs, some handwritten, and parsing errors happen.
Elsewhere
Canada requires federal officials to disclose assets and material changes through the Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, with a public registry — though without the per-transaction reporting the STOCK Act requires. The UK’s Register of Members’ Financial Interests covers shareholdings above a threshold, again without transaction-level disclosure.
The US regime is by some distance the most granular of the three.