Hillscore for press and researchers

Hillscore is an independent research site that tests whether congressional stock trades actually worked. It prices every disclosed common-stock purchase by 36 of the most active traders in Congress against daily market data, measures each one against its own sector, and publishes the underlying data so the results can be checked rather than taken on trust.

Headline findings

Every figure below uses purchases from the last five years, measured three months after each purchase against the stock's own sector ETF over the same period, and is recalculated every night. How sure each finding is.

1. Is there an edge at all? Across 5,463 scored purchases, the average stock rose +4.87% over the following three months but came to −0.21% against its own sector, with a 95% range of −0.74% to +0.32%. The range includes zero, so there is no measurable edge in either direction.

2. Does committee access help? Purchases in a sector one of the member's own committees oversees (Notable) came to −2.67% against their sectors, against +0.11% for purchases with no committee overlap (Unaligned): a gap of −2.79 percentage points, 95% range −4.37 to −1.20. The whole range is below zero: Notable buys did worse, and the gap is unlikely to be chance.

3. Does buying together help? 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. Leaving out the mega-caps nearly every member buys, Cluster purchases came to −0.82% against their sectors, against −0.70% for purchases no other member made. The range includes zero, so buying alongside other members shows no measurable difference either way.

Notable and Cluster are screening signals, not evidence or allegations of wrongdoing. See the disclaimer.

Coverage

• Who: 36 of the most active disclosed traders in Congress, not all 535 members. The list is chosen for trading activity and reviewed periodically.
• What: common stocks listed on the NYSE or Nasdaq. Options, bonds, funds and other assets are excluded from the returns.
• When: a rolling five-year window, updated daily as new disclosures are filed.
• Where the data comes from: trade disclosures come from a commercial feed that parses the House Clerk's Periodic Transaction Reports and the Senate's electronic filings. Prices are public daily closing prices; the actual execution price is never disclosed.

Methodology and data

• Methodology: every calculation, and every known limitation.
• Data: the trades and scored outcomes as CSV downloads, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You are free to use and republish them, including commercially, with credit to Hillscore and a link.
• Research: articles built on the data, starting with whether Congress beats the market.

Citing Hillscore

Please credit: Source: Hillscore (hillscore.com), analysis of congressional stock-trading disclosures, with a link to the page or dataset used.

Media and research enquiries

Keith Chester, Hillscore — press@hillscore.com

Happy to supply the figures behind any finding, explain how they were calculated, or run a specific cut of the data for a story.