Congressional Trading
Congressional trading refers to the personal financial transactions of US Members of Congress, their spouses, and senior staff. Disclosure is required under the STOCK Act of 2012 via the Periodic Transaction Report (PTR) regime.
What's disclosed
PTRs report every transaction worth more than $1,000 within 45 days of the trade. Each filing includes the asset (ticker when applicable), transaction type (purchase / sale / exchange), the amount range (PTRs disclose ranges like $1,001-$15,000, not exact dollar amounts), and the date.
The filings are public on the Clerk of the House and Secretary of the Senate websites. We parse the House feed comprehensively; Senate disclosures are similar but filed separately.
Why people watch it
Members of Congress sit on committees with access to classified briefings, draft legislation, and closed-door industry hearings. Whether this constitutes a tradeable informational advantage is endlessly debated, but the data consistently shows certain patterns:
- Defense-contractor purchases by members on Armed Services committees
- Pharma trades clustered around FDA committee work
- Semiconductor turnover ahead of export-control announcements
- Tech / antitrust positioning ahead of legislative hearings
Whether these patterns reflect informational advantage or coincidence is unprovable from the data alone — but the patterns are observable.
The 45-day window
PTR data is inherently lagging. The disclosure deadline is 45 days from the transaction; by the time you see a trade in a public PTR, it's up to a month and a half old. The signal is therefore not about timing your own trade to a member's; it's about identifying patterns of cross-party buying or selling in single names that might suggest something is known by people closer to policy.
How Top Tier Newswire surfaces it
We parse the daily House Clerk ZIP feed plus every member's individual PTR PDF. The public ticker pages at /congress/$TICKER show the 90-day delayed history; Pro subscribers get same-day alerts on new filings via the live terminal.