What is the STOCK Act?
The STOCK Act is the 2012 law requiring members of Congress to publicly report trades over one thousand dollars. The filing is a Periodic Transaction Report, due within thirty days of learning of the trade and no later than forty-five days after it. Amounts are reported as ranges, never exact figures.
How it works
The reporting document is the Periodic Transaction Report, usually shortened to PTR. It covers the member's own transactions and those of a spouse or dependent child, and it is triggered by any purchase, sale or exchange of a covered security above $1,000. The deadline has two halves: 30 days from the day the filer learns of the transaction, capped at 45 days after the transaction itself.
Amounts are bands, not figures. A PTR reports a range — $1,001 – $15,000, $15,001 – $50,000, $50,001 – $100,000 and upward — and no exact amount is ever disclosed, so no exact amount can ever be shown by anyone reading the filings. A book built from PTRs is a book of ranges, and any single figure derived from one is somebody's choice of where inside the band to stand.
The law requires disclosure; it does not ban trading. What it did settle is that members are not exempt from the insider-trading laws that apply to everyone else, and it built the public filing systems the reports are posted to. Proposals to restrict congressional trading are introduced regularly and are a separate matter from the reporting duty described here.
Filing late is common and the standard penalty is small — a $200 late fee. That matters for how the record reads: the trade date and the disclosure date are different dates, and the gap between them is routinely weeks and sometimes far longer.
What a filing cannot tell you is as important as what it can. A transaction may have been made by a spouse, a trustee or a managed account with no involvement from the member. No form states a reason for a trade, and nothing in the record implies one.
The two chambers file into different systems — the Clerk of the House's disclosure site and the Senate's electronic financial disclosure system — which is why coverage, formats and even whether a filing arrives as searchable text or a scanned image differ between them.
Where you see this in the terminal
Congressional tradesevery disclosed filing by member, with the reporting lag shown on each row
Most-traded companieswhich companies the congressional record names most over its trailing window
How we read the filingsthe labelling, the bracket handling and what we refuse to estimate
The conventions behind it
What this page explains in plain language, the methodology documents state as conventions: the inputs, what is rejected, and the stated limits.
Sources
- The STOCK Act (Pub. L. 112-105).
- The Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives' financial-disclosure system.
- The U.S. Senate's electronic financial disclosure (eFD) system.
All public records — see the data sources page.
More of these: every concept page. The full transparency index is at Methodology.