Congressional committee stock trades
Committee stock trades are the sharpest question in congressional trading. A member of the House Intelligence Committee buying a defence contractor, or a Financial Services member buying a bank, is not doing anything unlawful. It is also the single clearest structural conflict in congressional stock trading, and almost nobody publishes it as data.
This is what Hillscore's committee mapping exists to measure. Every disclosed buy is checked against the committees the member actually sits on, and flagged where the stock's sector falls under that committee's jurisdiction.
The committees with the most overlap
Counting flagged trades — those where a tracked member bought into a sector their own committee oversees:
| Committee | Notable trades |
|---|---|
| House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence | 436 |
| House Committee on Financial Services | 399 |
| House Committee on Education and Workforce | 305 |
| House Committee on Energy and Commerce | 144 |
| Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation | 104 |
Two cautions before reading anything into that ordering.
It reflects who trades, not who is compromised. A committee with one prolific trader will outrank a committee of twelve members who rarely trade. The count measures disclosure volume passing through a jurisdiction, not propensity.
Jurisdictions differ enormously in breadth. Intelligence maps to defence and technology; Financial Services to banks, insurance and real estate. A broad remit catches more trades mechanically. Every committee page shows which sectors it is mapped to.
How a trade gets flagged
Two tags mark committee overlap:
Notable — the stock's sector falls under a committee the member sits on.
Aligned (Mega-cap) — the overlap is real, but the stock is something almost anyone might own regardless of their seat. Owning Apple says little about committee access, so these are deliberately discounted.
Everything else is Unaligned, and forms the comparison baseline.
Separately, there is a Cluster marker. 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. That is a different question — members moving together — so it sits alongside the committee tags rather than among them.
What happened to those trades
This is the part that makes the exercise worth doing rather than merely suggestive. If committee access produced an information edge, flagged trades should outperform once each stock's own sector is accounted for.
The ones that test the theory do the opposite:
| Signal | Trades | vs. sector benchmark (3M) |
|---|---|---|
| Notable | 1,138 | −2.48% |
| Aligned (Mega-cap) | 573 | +2.79% |
| Unaligned | 5,325 | +0.04% |
Notable trades — committee overlap in a stock that is not a mega-cap — came to −2.48% against their benchmark, against +0.04% for trades with no overlap at all. That is a spread of 2.52 percentage points, pointing the opposite way to the theory. The whole range is below zero: Notable buys did worse, and the gap is unlikely to be chance.
The middle row goes the other way, and it is worth saying why rather than hiding it. Aligned (Mega-cap) trades came to +2.79% against their sectors. These are committee overlaps in companies almost anyone owns, and the result is the argument for discounting them: a seat on a committee overseeing technology tells you nothing about a purchase of Apple, and the numbers agree. What it measures is large-company performance, not access. The full analysis.
Why we still publish the flags
Because performance is not the only reason to care.
A flag records a structural conflict, not a prediction. A member who sits on a committee overseeing an industry, and holds stock in that industry, has a conflict whether the position made money or lost it. Disclosure records the conflict; it does not resolve it. That remains true when the trade performs badly, as 1,138 Notable trades did more often than not: they beat their own sector 40.7% of the time.
The performance test answers a narrower question — is there evidence of an information advantage? — and the answer in this dataset is no. Those are different questions and it is worth keeping them apart, particularly since the finding is frequently misread as exonerating.
Which committees are excluded, and why
Not every committee is mapped. Three are deliberately left out:
Budget allocates across all twenty budget functions and never reaches specific programmes or companies. 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 its members lack access.
Rules and Ethics have no sector jurisdiction at all — they concern procedure and member conduct.
Appropriations is handled at subcommittee level rather than as a whole. Its subcommittees write the actual spending bills for named sectors — Defense, Energy and Water, Homeland Security — which makes them narrower signals than most full committees, not broader ones. Treating the parent committee as "too broad" while ignoring its subcommittees measured the wrong level.
The limits worth knowing
Only current membership is checked. A trade from 2023 is tested against the seats a member holds today. Assignments are fairly sticky for incumbents, but this is not exact.
The sector-to-committee mapping is our judgement, not an official classification. It is published in full so it can be disagreed with — see the mapping.
Coverage is partial. Every House member with ten or more disclosed stock purchases in the window, plus the senators our feed covers — not all 535.
Browse it yourself: all committees, or every flagged trade with the sector and committee behind each one.