The best and worst traders in Congress
Most lists of "Congress's best stock traders" are built from somebody's best trade. One spectacular pick, annualised, makes anyone look like a genius.
Ours is built differently: the plain average return of every disclosed buy a member has made in the last five years. Every trade counts once — a $2,000 purchase and a $2,000,000 purchase contribute equally — with no cherry-picked window and no dropped losers. We call it Composite, and it is deliberately unflattering.## The current top of the table
| # | Member | Composite | Priced trades |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dwight Evans (D-PA) | +83.4% | 16 |
| 2 | Pete Sessions (R-TX) | +69.6% | 20 |
| 3 | Al Green (D-TX) | +64.9% | 25 |
| 4 | William Keating (D-MA) | +61.6% | 28 |
| 5 | Michael Guest (R-MS) | +59.7% | 40 |
And the bottom:
| # | Member | Composite | Priced trades |
|---|---|---|---|
| 57 | Bruce Westerman (R-AR) | −2.9% | 90 |
| 58 | April McClain Delaney (D-MD) | −3.1% | 260 |
| 59 | Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) | −3.8% | 11 |
| 60 | John J. McGuire III (R-VA) | −9.3% | 13 |
The live rankings update daily.
Read the trade count before the percentage
Look at rank 1 and rank 59. Dwight Evans's +83.4% rests on 16 trades. Zoe Lofgren's −3.8% rests on 11.
A member with a handful of trades and one good one can top a table that a member with hundreds cannot, because the average has almost nothing to average. We require ten priced trades from the last five years before ranking anyone at all, and even that is a low bar — below about fifty, treat the figure as an anecdote with a decimal point.
Michael Guest, on 40 trades, is the more meaningful entry near the top. Sustaining +59.7% across that many decisions is a different claim from doing it across a dozen.
The bigger problem with the whole table
Every number above is a raw return. It credits the member with whatever their sectors did anyway.
Across all 7,187 scored buys in this dataset, the average disclosed purchase is up 4.47% after three months — and −0.14% measured against each stock's own sector benchmark over the same window. Most of what the rankings show is the market, not the picker. The full comparison.
So the honest reading of the table is: these members' disclosed buys returned the most over this period. Not: these members are the best stock pickers in Congress. The second claim needs the sector stripped out, and when you strip it out most of the difference goes with it.
We publish the raw ranking anyway, because it is the number people come for and hiding it would be its own kind of dishonesty. We just put the caveat next to it rather than in a footnote.
What about party?
The congressional-trading ETFs split by party — NANC for Democrats, KRUZ for Republicans — which implies party is a meaningful predictor.In this dataset it explains little. Mean Composite is +21.5% across 27 Democrats and +19.4% across 33 Republicans, a gap of 2.1 points, and the top ten contains 5 Republicans and 5 Democrats. Set against how widely individual members' scores spread, a party average says almost nothing about any one of them. What those funds actually hold.
What the ranking cannot tell you
Whose decision it was. Spouse and dependent-child trades are filed under the member's name. Why that matters. Nancy Pelosi's options are the best-known case: every one of her husband's calls, scored.
What they actually paid. Filings disclose a date and an amount band, never an execution price. Every figure uses that day's closing price as a stand-in.
Whether they still hold it. Sales disclose on the same 30–45 day lag as purchases.
Anything about the members we do not cover. Coverage is every House member with ten or more disclosed stock purchases in the window, plus the senators our data feed covers. Members who trade rarely, or hold only index funds, do not appear — absence from this table is not a finding.
Check it
Every trade behind every score is in the published dataset, and the scoring rule is written out in full on the methodology page. If you think equal-weighting each buy is the wrong rule, the file has what you need to score it your way.