How Coldpine works

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 the 90-day return of each member’s disclosed purchases versus the S&P 500, so a member’s record is more than a count of trades. It is informational only, not investment advice, and it never connects to your broker. Who publishes it, the editorial standards it holds to, and how to request a correction are on the about page.

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 same data is available to AI assistants through our MCP server.

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.

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 71 members with at least five priced purchases today, 33 are ahead of the S&P 500 on this measure and 38 are not. That average describes past disclosed purchases and does not show that a member will stay ahead. See the leaderboard.

A purchase with no price 90 days later is left out too, usually because the company failed, was bought out or changed its ticker before the window closed. That is 50 of 12,625 purchases today, including First Republic and Silicon Valley Bank. Counting the 35 we can still price at their last available close moves the average gap to the S&P 500 from -1.18 to -1.23 points.

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.