Hillscore

About Hillscore

Plenty of sites list what Congress bought. Hillscore scores it.

The question this site exists to answer is a simple one that surprisingly few people have answered with numbers: when members of Congress buy stocks, do those picks actually make money? Not "did someone buy Nvidia before it ran" — but on average, across everything disclosed, priced the way an analyst would price any other portfolio.

What Hillscore does

It follows every House member with at least ten disclosed stock purchases in five years — a threshold, not a shortlist, and nothing to do with party, seniority or editorial judgement — and prices every disclosed common-stock buy against real daily closing prices. Each trade is scored at its realised return if it has since been sold, or marked to today's price if the position is still open. The average across a politician's trades is their Composite score.

Alongside that, Hillscore flags trades falling in a sector the politician's own committee oversees, and separately flags cases where several members of the same committee bought the same stock within weeks of each other. Both are patterns worth a second look — not proof of anything.

Why you can check the numbers

Every trade comes from a public STOCK Act disclosure — the same House Clerk and Senate filings any citizen can pull — and every price is public daily close data. Nothing here is scraped from a paywalled source or estimated beyond what the filings actually disclose. The full method, including what it deliberately doesn't do and where it has known gaps, is on the methodology page.

That transparency is deliberate. This site makes measured claims about named people; the least it can do is show its working.

Why not all 535 members

Coverage is a rule, applied to the whole House: at least ten disclosed common-stock purchases in the last five years, counted from the members' own filings. Below ten, an average says more about luck than about anyone's decisions.

Until 27 September 2026 it was by trading volume instead, which put a bias into every figure published before that date — selecting members for how often they trade while measuring how well they trade quietly excludes anyone who trades rarely and does it well. The methodology page sets out what that cost and what replaced it.

It is still not a complete picture of Congress. Ten purchases is a threshold, members who file on paper remain unreadable whatever they trade, and senators come from a commercial feed because the Senate publishes to a separate system this pipeline does not read.

What this isn't

Hillscore is not investment advice, is not affiliated with Congress or any government body or political party, and doesn't suggest any past return will repeat. See the disclaimer.

Who runs it

Hillscore is an independent project, built and maintained by Keith Chester, a CIMA-qualified management accountant (CGMA) and member of the Association of Accounting Technicians. He has served as Head of UK Analytics for a Canadian group, and spent fourteen years as managing director of a company he founded.

The analytical approach here — measure the thing properly, show the method, state the limitations — is the same one that work required.

Hillscore isn't funded by, affiliated with, or acting on behalf of any organisation, campaign or political interest.

Found an error, a stale figure, or a trade that looks wrong? Get in touch — corrections are logged and published.

Data last updated .