Congressional stock trades

How this is read

Members of Congress, their spouses and dependent children must disclose trades in stocks, bonds, options and funds within 30 days of learning of the trade and 45 days of the trade itself. House members file with the Clerk of the House, whose yearly index lists every report and links a PDF; e-filed PDFs carry a text table we read row by row, while reports filed on paper are scans we can only link to. Senators file in the Senate’s eFD system, where each electronic report is a web page with one table.

Filers are matched to members through the public legislators dataset (bioguide ids, party, state and district), which is also where the portraits come from. A filer that cannot be matched, such as a candidate, still gets a page, marked as unmatched. There is no conviction score for congressional trades: the forms carry no role, no holdings before and after, and no trading-plan flag, so the inputs the insider score rests on are missing. Trades are ranked by filing date or amount, and the outcome table above shows what happened after past disclosed purchases and sales, with its sample size, so you can judge how much weight to give them. See the methodology.