How to read a congressional trade disclosure
Congressional trade filings look simpler than they are. Every field carries a caveat, and three of them routinely produce wrong conclusions in news coverage.
This is what each part actually means.
The five fields that matter
Owner. Whether the transaction belonged to the member, a spouse, a dependent child or a joint account. In principle this distinguishes "the senator bought" from "the senator's spouse bought". In practice it is inconsistently completed and does not survive reliably into the data feeds trackers are built on — including ours. Why that matters.
Asset. The security description, as typed. Expect boilerplate:
NVIDIA Corporation - Common Stock (NVDA) [ST]. The bracketed code is the
asset type — ST for stock, OP for options, CS for corporate securities.
Anything that is not ordinary common stock is a different instrument with
different risk, and lumping options in with shares is a common error.
Transaction type. Purchase, sale, or exchange. Partial sales are common and are not distinguished from full exits, so "sold" does not mean "out".
Transaction date. When the trade happened. This is the date that matters for measuring anything.
Amount. A band, never a figure: $1,001–$15,000, $15,001–$50,000,
and so on up to over $50,000,000. No exact sum is ever disclosed.
The three that mislead
The filing date is not the trade date. A report filed in September may disclose a trade from July. Members have 30 to 45 days, and filings arrive in batches near the deadline. Any return measured from the filing date silently credits the member with weeks of price movement nobody could have acted on. We measure from the transaction date for exactly this reason.
There is no price. Filings disclose a date and a band. Every price you see on this site or any other is a stand-in — here, the stock's ordinary closing price on the transaction date. It is the only consistent choice available, and it is not what the member paid.
The band is not the position. $1,001–$15,000 spans fifteen times its own
floor. A member could have bought $1,100 or $14,900 of something and filed
identically. Any dollar total built from these is an estimate, which is why
every money figure on this site is rounded hard and prefixed c.
What is missing entirely
Holdings you never see. Only transactions over $1,000 are reported. A position bought before the reporting period and never traded does not appear in transaction reports at all.
Index funds and diversified holdings. Widely held investment funds are exempt where the member does not control the holdings. A member showing no trades may simply own index funds — absence of trades is not absence of investments.
Blind trusts. Qualified blind trusts are exempt on the reasoning that you cannot act on what you cannot see.
Why. No filing states a reason. Everything you read about motive — including the framing on this site — is inference from timing and position.
Three mistakes worth avoiding
Reading a big band as a big conviction. $1,000,001–$5,000,000 from a
wealthy member's managed portfolio may represent a smaller share of their
holdings than $1,001–$15,000 does from someone else's.
Treating a cluster of trades as a decision. Twenty transactions filed on one date is usually a portfolio rebalance or a managed account, not twenty convictions.
Reading a well-timed trade as a proven one. A purchase days before good news is consistent with inside information, with a broker's recommendation, with a spouse's decision, and with luck. Distinguishing them requires evidence a filing does not contain — see what is actually illegal.
Where to see the originals
Filings are public at their source: the House Clerk publishes Periodic Transaction Reports, and the Senate publishes electronic financial disclosures. Every figure on this site traces back to one of those documents, and where we disagree with a filing, the filing is right.
Our processed version of the same data — with prices attached, sectors assigned, and returns calculated — is published in full so the two can be compared directly.