The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act was passed in 2012 after reporting suggested that members of Congress were beating the market by trading on information the public couldn't see. The law requires Senators, Representatives, and many senior staff to disclose stock, bond, and commodity transactions over 1,000 USD within 45 days.
The disclosures are public. SafetyMargin.io surfaces them on each stock's page so you can see, at a glance, whether elected officials are buying or selling alongside the corporate insiders.
What the Data Shows
For each disclosed trade we display the filer's name, party and state (extracted from the official title), the trade direction (buy or sell), the stock price on the disclosed date, and the trade date itself. Counts over the trailing three and twelve months give you a quick sense of activity level.
We do not show a dollar amount. The STOCK Act lets filers report a wide range (for example 50,001-250,000 USD) rather than an exact figure, and inventing a single number out of a range would mislead more than it informs. If sizing matters, the original filing on the Senate or House clerk's website is one click away.
Where the Signal Is Real
The most defensible reading is cluster activity by ideologically diverse members. When several Senators from both parties buy the same name in the same window, two things have to be true: the trade is unusual enough that several people independently chose to make it, and the conviction is not driven by partisan policy preference. That intersection is rare and usually worth a closer look.
A handful of individual members have generated genuinely outsized returns over multi-year periods, most famously the household of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Their disclosures get more attention than others for that reason. But following one filer's book is closer to copying a strategy than reading a signal, and the lag means you are buying at least 45 days after they did.
The Senator Richard Burr COVID disclosures in early 2020 are the cleanest example of a filing that, in retrospect, contained material non-public information. Burr sold heavily in mid-February 2020 after attending a confidential pandemic briefing, weeks before the market crashed. He was investigated by the SEC and FBI but not charged. The episode is the prosecutorial benchmark for what congressional insider trading looks like, and it is also why filings are now scrutinized so closely.
Where the Signal Drowns in Noise
Most congressional trades are placed by spouses, blind trustees, or wealth managers without the member's direct involvement. Many are part of pre-existing portfolio rebalancing rather than discretionary calls. And the 45-day disclosure window means that by the time you see a trade, the relevant news has often already moved the price.
Academic studies looking at Congress as a whole tend to find no systematic edge versus passive index investing over long windows. The outperforming names are the exception, not the rule, and survivorship bias dominates the headlines.
A single trade by a single member is almost never a signal. Treat it like one insider sale: noise until proven otherwise.
How to Read the Section
- Buys (3M) and Sells (3M) show what has happened recently. A spike here is the most actionable view.
- Buys (12M) and Sells (12M) give you the longer baseline. A name that consistently shows trading activity is different from one with a single isolated trade.
- Individual rows show the politician's name with their party-state tag, the trade direction, the disclosed price, and the trade date. Click through to the official filing if a particular trade matters to your thesis.
What This Is Not
Congress trading is not a substitute for understanding the business. It is one quirky data series among many, and the Buffett framework still does the work: a wonderful business at a fair price, a margin of safety against your own mistakes, and a long enough holding period that the trading patterns of any single group become irrelevant.
Use the data to ask questions, not to skip them. If three Senators from different states all bought a name in the same month, that is worth a look. If one Representative bought a thousand-dollar lot, it is barely a footnote.
The Bottom Line
The STOCK Act gives investors a window into what elected officials are doing with their own money. Most of the time the window shows nothing interesting. Occasionally it shows a cluster of trades that warrant attention. And rarely, it shows the kind of pattern that suggests someone was acting on information the public didn't have.
Worth checking. Not worth trading on by itself.