How to read congressional trading disclosures
What the law requires
The STOCK Act requires members of the US House and Senate to publicly disclose transactions in stocks and similar assets, for themselves and for their spouses and dependent children. Filings are due within 45 days of the transaction. Every row on this page comes from those disclosures.
The obligation is to report, not to seek permission. Members of Congress are permitted to trade individual shares, and the great majority of what appears here is unremarkable: index funds, retirement accounts, and holdings managed by someone else on the member's behalf.
The amounts are brackets, not figures
This is the detail most often lost when these filings are written about. Members disclose a range, not a number: $1,001 to $15,000, $15,001 to $50,000, $50,001 to $100,000, and wider bands above that. A transaction shown as $1,001 to $15,000 could be either end of that span.
So totals built from this data are estimates with very wide error bars, and any headline claiming a precise figure for what a member made or lost has invented a number the filings do not contain. Ranges can tell you the rough scale of a position. They cannot tell you its size.
The delay, and what it does to the signal
A trade can be up to 45 days old before it must be disclosed, and in practice filings often arrive near that limit. The price has moved by then, frequently a great deal, so treating a disclosure as a trade idea means acting on information that is already weeks stale and was never a recommendation.
The transaction date is shown alongside the disclosure for exactly this reason. Reading the gap between them is part of reading the row.
What a row does not prove
A disclosure records that a transaction happened. It does not record who decided on it. Many members hold assets in accounts managed by advisers, or in blind trusts, and those transactions are reported in the member's name regardless of whether the member knew about them in advance.
Nor is a well-timed trade evidence of anything by itself. Across hundreds of members and thousands of transactions a year, some will land immediately before good news through arithmetic alone. Establishing that a particular trade was informed requires evidence this data does not contain.
What the data is genuinely good for is transparency of the ordinary kind: seeing which sectors legislators are exposed to, whether members of a committee hold shares in the industries they oversee, and how patterns change over time. Those are answerable questions. "Is this insider trading" is not one of them, and the disclosures alone cannot settle it.
