Methodology — Congressional Trades (STOCK Act)

What members of Congress disclose about their own securities trades, shown as disclosed — ranges, lags and all. Amounts are never exact, positions are never verified, and no causal claim is made. This is a transparency surface, not a signal.

What the data is

The STOCK Act requires members of Congress to disclose securities transactions over $1,000 in a Periodic Transaction Report (PTR) within 30–45 days. We ingest PTRs first-party from both chambers' official disclosure systems: the U.S. House Clerk's financial-disclosure records and the Senate eFD system. Party and state come from the public congress-legislators dataset.

Only stock/ETF lines with a real ticker are kept; bonds/treasuries and option lines are skipped. A filing that is a scanned image with no text layer (common for paper filers) is skipped, never guessed — coverage is therefore of e-filed reports, and honest gaps remain.

Known limitations (inherent to the source)

• Amounts are ranges. The law requires disclosure in dollar bands ($1,001–$15,000, $15,001–$50,000, …). We store and display the band's minimum and maximum — a PTR never contains an exact amount, so the app never shows one.
• Disclosure lag. Trades are routinely disclosed weeks after execution (and are permitted to be). Every trade row carries its lag in days (trade date → disclosure date) so the staleness is visible, not hidden.
• Self-reported. Filings contain errors, amendments and inconsistent security descriptions; trades may be executed by a spouse or dependent, through managed accounts, or without the member's involvement. Nothing here implies the member personally timed a trade.

Derived fields (what & why)

• Buy / sell tallies per member and per ticker — simple counts of disclosed purchase and sale lines in our stored window.
• Estimated net positions ("still holds"). Per member and ticker: disclosed buys minus sells, each valued at the midpoint of its disclosed range. A name is tagged accumulated (buys only), net buyer, net seller, or flat. This is an approximation from ranges over our stored window — not a verified portfolio: positions opened before our window, exact amounts, and unreported changes are all invisible to it. It answers "what do the disclosures suggest they still hold?", nothing stronger.
• Disclosure lag days — trade date to disclosure date, per trade.

Honesty rules

Ranges are never averaged into a point value except in the clearly-labeled net-position estimate, whose midpoint basis is disclosed wherever it appears. Un-parseable filings are skipped, never inferred. The data is shown as disclosed, is not investment advice, and supports no claim about why any trade was made.

Sources

U.S. House Clerk financial-disclosure PTRs; U.S. Senate eFD PTRs; the congress-legislators public dataset (party/state). All public records — see the data-sources page for details.