How Coldpine works
Coldpine parses every U.S. Congressional stock-trade disclosure within hours of filing, scores it for signal strength, and measures which members actually beat the market. Here is exactly how, what the numbers mean, and what they don’t.
What Coldpine is
Coldpine is a publisher of intelligence on public Congressional stock-trade disclosures. Most trackers stop at the feed, showing you what Congress traded. Coldpine adds the layer on top: we score every trade for signal strength and measure each member’s real return versus the S&P 500, so you see which trades matter and who trades well, not just who trades a lot. It is informational only, not investment advice, and it never connects to your broker.
Where the data comes from
Every figure on Coldpine traces to an official government filing: the U.S. House Clerk’s financial disclosure portal and the U.S. Senate’s electronic Financial Disclosure (eFD) system, the public records mandated by the STOCK Act. We poll both portals continuously and parse each periodic transaction report into structured rows (ticker, side, amount range, owner, dates). Every transaction links back to the original PDF.
The signal score
Each disclosed trade gets a score from four live factors:
- Disclosure speed, how quickly the member reported the trade.
- Trade size, the disclosed amount range.
- Cluster activity, whether several members bought the same name in the same window.
- Member track record, a proxy built from the member’s own disclosure history.
Scores above 0.65 are the high-conviction reads. Trades made in family-trust or wealth-manager-run accounts are penalized, so a score reflects member conviction rather than routine portfolio rebalancing.
Measuring who beats the market
For each disclosed purchase, we take the stock’s return over the next 90 days and subtract the S&P 500’s return over the same period. Averaged across a member’s purchases, that is their alpha versus the market.
Of the 62 members with enough priced purchases to measure today, 23 beat the S&P 500. Most members of Congress do not beat the market, the point of Coldpine is surfacing the ones who do. See the leaderboard.
What the numbers do and don't mean
Alpha here is point-in-time and measures disclosed buys, not realized profit-and-loss or a member’s current holdings. Scores are heuristics for signal strength, not a prediction or a recommendation. Coldpine is informational only and is not a broker-dealer, investment adviser, or fiduciary. Nothing here is a suggestion to buy or sell anything.
Frequently asked questions
- Do members of Congress beat the stock market?
- Most do not. Coldpine measures the 90-day return of each member's disclosed stock purchases against the S&P 500 over the same window. Across members with enough priced purchases to measure, only a minority beat the market. The value is identifying the few who consistently do, not assuming Congress as a whole is a good signal.
- What is the STOCK Act?
- The STOCK Act (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012) requires members of the U.S. Congress to publicly disclose stock and securities transactions, generally within 45 days. Those disclosures, filed with the House Clerk and the Senate, are the public records Coldpine parses.
- How does Coldpine score a Congressional trade?
- Each trade gets a signal score from four live factors: disclosure speed (how fast the member reported it), trade size, cluster activity (whether several members bought the same name in the same window), and the member's own track record. Scores above 0.65 are the high-conviction reads. Trades in family trust or wealth-manager-run accounts are penalized so the score reflects member conviction, not portfolio rebalancing.
- How does Coldpine measure who beats the market?
- For each disclosed purchase, we take the stock's return over the next 90 days and subtract the S&P 500's return over the same period. Averaged across a member's purchases, that is their alpha. It is point-in-time and measures disclosed buys, not realized profit-and-loss or current holdings.
- Where does Coldpine's data come from?
- Official government disclosures: the U.S. House Clerk's financial disclosure portal and the U.S. Senate's electronic Financial Disclosure (eFD) system. Every transaction on Coldpine links back to the original filing, so it is auditable, not a proprietary feed.
- Is Coldpine investment advice?
- No. Coldpine is a publisher of intelligence on public Congressional disclosures. It is informational only, not investment advice, and it does not connect to your brokerage or trade on your behalf. Every decision stays with you.