Notable trades: when a stock sits under a politician's own committee

Members of Congress sitting on a committee that oversees an industry may have earlier or better information about it than the market does. Hillscore flags trades where that overlap exists. Which committees trade their own sectors works the question through committee by committee.

These are screening signals, not accusations. Committee jurisdiction is broad, plenty of matches are coincidence, and a flag is not evidence that any trade used non-public information. Members of Congress are legally permitted to trade stocks.

How a trade gets flagged

Every disclosed buy gets exactly one of four tags, in descending order of how specific the overlap is:

Cluster

A separate marker, not a committee tag. A buy is marked Cluster when at least one other tracked member of Congress bought the same stock within 30 days of it, regardless of committee membership. It appears beside the committee tag, so a trade can be both Notable and Cluster. Popular stocks cluster often, because many members buy them.

Mega-cap

Another separate marker: the stock is a widely-held mega-cap that almost anyone might own. It is shown wherever the committee tag does not already say so, and mega-caps are left out of the Cluster comparison.

Notable

The stock's sector falls under a committee the politician currently sits on. Every stock's sector is published, along with where the classification came from.

Aligned (Mega-cap)

The sector does overlap with one of their committees, but the stock is a widely-held mega-cap almost anyone might own regardless of their seat. The overlap is real; it just isn't evidence of anything. Owning Apple says little about committee access.

Unaligned

No overlap at all — the stock's sector falls outside every committee the politician sits on. This is the baseline the flagged trades are measured against in the comparison below.

Flags use each member's current committee seats. An older trade is checked against the committees they sit on today, not the ones they held when they traded, so a flag on an older trade can be wrong in either direction. More on the limitations.

What we found: three questions

The premise is testable, so we tested it against our own data — including the possibility that the answer is no. Every figure below uses the 7,187 buys from the last five years, measured against each stock's own sector ETF over the same period.

1. Is there an edge at all?

All scored buys, at each checkpoint after the purchase date — raw, and net of the stock's own sector benchmark ETF over the identical window.

At three months, −0.14% against the sector, with a 95% range of −0.57% to +0.29%. The range includes zero, so there is no measurable edge in either direction.

2. Does committee access help?

If committee access produced an edge, Notable trades should show higher returns than ordinary ones once each stock's own sector is accounted for.

Sample sizes and percentages are computed on the same population — trades with sector-benchmark data available — so the counts match the figures beside them.

Notable against Unaligned: a gap of −2.52 percentage points, 95% range −3.67 to −1.38. The whole range is below zero: Notable buys did worse, and the gap is unlikely to be chance.

3. Does buying together help?

Buys at least one other tracked member also made within 30 days, against buys nobody else made. Mega-caps are left out of both sides — nearly every member buys them, and including them would measure large-company momentum rather than members moving together.

Sample sizes and percentages are computed on the same population — trades with sector-benchmark data available — so the counts match the figures beside them.

Cluster against not clustered: a gap of −1.11 percentage points, 95% range −2.40 to +0.18. The range includes zero, so buying alongside other members shows no measurable difference either way.

How these ranges are worked out, and why they run slightly narrow.

Known limitations

• Only current committee membership is checked, so an older trade is measured against today's seats rather than the one held at the time.
• The committee-to-sector mapping is a hand-curated judgement, not an official classification.
• Appropriations is mapped at subcommittee level — Defense, Energy and Water, Homeland Security and so on — because those subcommittees write the actual spending bills for named sectors, making them narrower signals than most full committees. Budget, Rules and Ethics stay excluded: Budget allocates across all twenty budget functions and never reaches specific programmes, so a flag would fire on nearly every trade its members make and carry no information. That is a limit of this signal, not a claim that those members lack access.

Every flagged trade

Trades carrying a Notable flag, marked Cluster where another tracked member bought the same stock within 30 days, newest filing first, with the sector each stock was assigned and the committee that caused the flag. Widely-held mega-caps are tagged Aligned (Mega-cap) and excluded from this table — they appear in the comparison above. Showing the 200 most recent of 3,426.

By committee

Notable trade counts for each committee tracked members sit on.

Data last updated 31 October 2026.