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.

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

The strongest signal. At least one other tracked member of the same committee traded the same stock within 30 days. Colleagues moving on the same name in the same month is a narrower, more specific pattern than one person trading in their committee's sector alone.

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.

What we found when we tested it

The premise is testable, so we tested it against our own data — including the possibility that the answer is no.

If committee access produced an edge, Notable and Cluster trades should show higher returns than ordinary ones once each stock's own sector is accounted for. Across 4,791 scored buys, they don't:

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

Trades flagged Notable — those in a sector the politician's own committee oversees — underperformed their sector benchmark by more than ordinary unflagged trades did. That is the opposite of what the committee-access theory predicts, and it's reported because it's what the data shows rather than because it's the better story.

How every disclosed buy performed

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.

The pattern worth noticing: raw returns are solidly positive and improve with time, while returns measured against the sector are flat to slightly negative. Most of what looks like skill is explained by what was bought rather than when. Full method and limitations.

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 or Cluster flag, 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 2,003.

By committee

Flagged trade counts for each committee tracked members sit on.

Data last updated 10 September 2026.