The legal regime
The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012 requires every member of Congress, certain senior staff, and most executive-branch employees to file a Periodic Transaction Report (PTR) within 45 days of any covered securities trade over $1,000.
The "covered securities" list is broad: stocks, bonds, ETFs, mutual funds, options, and most derivatives. The exception that swallows the rule is diversified mutual funds — a member can buy a single-sector ETF and not disclose it under most interpretations.
The format problem
PTRs are filed as PDFs, not structured data. The disclosures are technically public, but:
- Amounts are reported as ranges ($1,001–$15,000, $15,001–$50,000, etc.) — not exact dollars.
- Tickers are sometimes typed by hand, sometimes left blank.
- Spouse and dependent-child trades are often filed jointly and indistinguishable.
- Senate filings live behind the eFD search UI, which actively rate-limits scrapers.
OpenStocks ingests House PTRs from the bulk ZIP feed published by the Clerk and runs them through pdftotext — about 95% extract cleanly. Senate PTRs are scraped from the eFD search session.
What the data shows
Across the trailing 24 months on OpenStocks, the breakdown of disclosed Congressional trades looks roughly like this:
- ~58% buys, ~42% sells (by transaction count).
- Median disclosed amount: $1,001–$15,000.
- ~12% of trades are in tickers regulated by a committee the member sits on (we surface these on
/congress/committees/[slug]?hr=1).
That last number is the politically interesting one. It's not necessarily evidence of insider trading — sector overlap is statistically expected — but it's a useful conflict-of-interest filter.
What's not in the data
The STOCK Act does not require disclosure of:
- The reason for the trade ("portfolio rebalance" vs "thesis change").
- Whether the trade was discretionary or made by an outside manager.
- Holdings inside qualified blind trusts.
- Cryptocurrency or non-securities assets.
So the absence of trades doesn't mean a member doesn't trade — it may just mean their wealth is structured to bypass disclosure.
What we do with it
OpenStocks publishes every PTR we can parse, with a direct link to the underlying PDF. We rank by:
- Member activity — most prolific traders.
- Ticker concentration — what stocks are most-bought / most-sold across the chamber.
- Committee relevance — flagged when a trade overlaps a committee's jurisdiction.
The rest is up to you to interpret.