US House Periodic Transaction Report (PTR)
A Periodic Transaction Report (PTR) is a disclosure filed by members of the US House of Representatives, their spouses, and senior congressional staff whenever any of them buys or sells a financial instrument worth more than $1,000. Required by the STOCK Act of 2012 ("Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act").
What's in a PTR
- Member name
- Asset being traded (ticker symbol when applicable)
- Transaction type, coded as:
- P: purchase
- S: sale (partial or full)
- E: exchange
- Date of transaction
- Date of filing (often weeks after the transaction)
- Amount range — PTRs disclose ranges, not exact dollar amounts. The lowest tier is
$1,001 – $15,000; the highest commonly seen isOver $50,000,000 - Owner: self, spouse (SP), dependent child (DC), or jointly held (JT)
Why it matters for trading
Members of Congress have access to closed-door briefings, classified information, and policy negotiations that move sectors and individual stocks. The STOCK Act made their personal trading public. The 45-day disclosure window means PTR trades are inherently lagging information — by the time you see a filing, the trade is up to a month and a half old — but cluster patterns of bipartisan buying or selling in a single name remain a meaningful signal of who knows what.
Notable observed patterns include defense-contractor purchases by members on Armed Services committees, pharma trades around FDA decisions, and rapid turnover in semiconductor names ahead of export-control announcements.
How Top Tier Newswire surfaces it
We parse the daily ZIP feed published by the Clerk of the House plus the individual PTR PDFs from each filer. Pro subscribers get same-day alerts on new filings; the public ticker pages at /congress/$TICKER show the 90-day delayed history.