How to Track Congress Stock Trades
Every stock trade a member of Congress makes over $1,000 becomes a public record within 45 days. That is the whole basis of congressional trade tracking: not leaks, not tips, just a filing requirement in the STOCK Act and two government websites that publish what gets filed. This guide covers where those filings live, how to read one, which of its dates matter, and how to follow a member, a stock, or a single day of filings. For scale: since January 2023, Coldpine has parsed 1,837 periodic transaction reports from 226 members, the latest filed September 14, 2026.
1. What gets disclosed, and what does not
The STOCK Act requires a member, and by extension the member’s spouse and dependent children, to report each purchase, sale or exchange of a stock, bond, commodity future or other security worth more than $1,000. The report is called a periodic transaction report, usually shortened to PTR. It is due within 30 days of the member learning about the trade and no later than 45 days after the trade date. Widely held investment funds such as most mutual funds and ETFs are exempt from PTR reporting, so a member whose money sits in index funds can be an active investor and file nothing.
Two things a PTR does not contain. It does not give the exact dollar amount; every trade is reported in a bracket, and the smallest bracket, $1,001 to $15,000, covers 71% of all disclosed trades on record (20,368 of 28,562). And it does not give the price or the share count, so a disclosure tells you that a trade happened, in what direction, and roughly how big, and nothing more precise than that.
2. Where the filings are published
The two chambers run separate systems and neither talks to the other. House members file with the Clerk of the House, whose Financial Disclosure portal (disclosures-clerk.house.gov) lists PTRs by year and by name and serves each one as a PDF. Most are typed; some are scanned handwritten forms. Senators file with the Secretary of the Senate through the Electronic Financial Disclosure system (efdsearch.senate.gov), which requires agreeing to a terms page on every visit, then lets you search by name, filing type and date range; reports open as web pages, or as scanned images for the paper filers.
Both portals are searchable and neither has a feed, an API or a change log. If you want to know when a new report lands you have to check, or have something check for you. Coldpine polls both every few minutes; of the 1,946 PTRs on record, 1,817 are House and 129 Senate, and 109 could not be parsed into trades (blank or unreadable scans, amendments with no transactions). Each parsed filing gets a page on this site with a link back to the source document, so any row can be checked against the original.
3. How to read a periodic transaction report
Every PTR, House or Senate, reduces to the same columns. Here is each one, with what the full record looks like on that column.
| Column | What it means | On the record |
|---|---|---|
| Owner | Whose account: the member (SP is spouse, DC dependent child, JT joint). A blank usually means the member. | 46% spouse · 31% child · 13% joint · 10% self |
| Asset | The security’s full name and, for listed stocks, its ticker in parentheses. Bonds, options, private holdings and funds often have no ticker. | 19% carry no ticker |
| Type | P for purchase, S for sale (sometimes S (partial)), E for exchange. | 16,987 P · 11,409 S · 166 E |
| Transaction date | The day the trade happened. This is the date the 45-day clock counts from. | 28,305 dated |
| Notification date | The day the member says they learned of the trade. Most trackers, including Coldpine, take the filing date as the disclosure date instead. | median lag 25 days |
| Amount | A bracket, never an exact figure: $1,001 to $15,000, $15,001 to $50,000, and so on up to over $50,000,000. | 71% in the smallest bracket |
The owner column deserves a second look because it changes what a row means. A large share of disclosed trading is done in spouse and dependent-child accounts rather than the member’s own, and a few very active households account for much of that volume. A row that says SP is still a household disclosure, but it is not the member placing the order.
4. The dates are the story
A PTR carries two dates that matter: when the trade happened and when the public learned of it. The gap between them is the lag, and it is the number to read before anything else. Across 28,305 dated trades the median lag is 25 days, and 7.0% (1,987) were disclosed after the 45-day deadline, 1,728 of them more than 90 days after the trade. The chambers differ sharply: House trades run a median of 24 days with 3.9% late, Senate trades 37 days with 45.0% late, and most of the Senate figure belongs to two senators rather than to the chamber.
The lag matters for two reasons. First, by the time you read a disclosure the stock has already had weeks to move; what happened in that window is measured in What Stocks Do Before Congress Discloses. Second, the lag is itself a compliance record, ranked member by member in Who Files Late? and split by party in Which Party Files Late?. A late filing is a fact about disclosure timing, not evidence about the trade.
5. Track a member, a stock, or a day
Once the filings are parsed into rows, tracking is a question of which way you want to slice them. These are the public surfaces on Coldpine, each built from the same source-linked rows.
- By member. Every filer has a page under /politicians with each disclosed trade, the report it came from, the lag, the most-traded tickers and a measured return versus the S&P 500. Browse the Senate or House roster, a state delegation, or enter a ZIP code at /delegation to find your own senators and representative.
- By stock. Every ticker Congress has disclosed has a page under /stocks: who bought, who sold, the compliance record of its traders and the paired pre-disclosure move. Paste your own holdings into the overlap checker to see which members traded them in the last 90 days.
- By filing. The filings index lists every parsed report newest first, each with its own page and a link to the source document, and every filing day has a page of its own, so a report you saw referenced by date can be found by date.
- By alert. A free account can follow members and receive an alert when a new report from any of them is parsed. The Sunday newsletter is the digest version.
- By assistant. The same data is available to Claude, ChatGPT and other AI assistants through a read-only MCP server, so you can ask questions of the record in plain language.
What tracking can and cannot tell you
Tracking gives you a complete, dated, source-linked record of what members and their households disclosed. It does not tell you why a trade was made, whether it was the member or a financial adviser who placed it, or what the position is worth today. Most members’ disclosed purchases do not beat the market; the ones that have are listed in Which Members of Congress Beat the Market?. Coldpine is an AI-based platform that parses, scores and publishes these disclosures. It describes the record; it does not recommend trades.
Frequently asked
Are congressional stock trades public?
Yes. Under the STOCK Act, members of Congress must file a periodic transaction report for any stock, bond, option or other security trade over $1,000 made by them, a spouse or a dependent child, within 30 days of learning of the trade and no more than 45 days after it. The reports are published by the Clerk of the House and the Senate Office of Public Records.
Where are the original disclosure documents?
House reports are on the Clerk's Financial Disclosure portal at disclosures-clerk.house.gov, mostly as PDFs. Senate reports are on the Senate Electronic Financial Disclosure system at efdsearch.senate.gov, as web pages or scanned images. Both are searchable by name and neither offers a feed, which is why trackers exist.
How long after a trade does it show up?
Up to 45 days by law. Coldpine measures the actual gap on every disclosed trade; the median is a few weeks, and a minority of reports arrive after the deadline. The figures on this page update as filings land.
Can I get an alert when a specific member files?
Yes. A free Coldpine account can follow any member; when a new report from that member is parsed, you receive an alert. The Sunday newsletter covers the week's most notable disclosures for readers who prefer a digest.
Methodology
Coverage counts every periodic transaction report with at least one parsed trade. Lag is disclosure date minus transaction date, both verbatim from the filings, restricted to a 0-to-1000-day sanity window to exclude source-document typos. The owner split excludes rows where the filing left the column blank. Amount brackets are the filing’s own; the smallest-bracket share counts rows whose bracket floor is $1,001 or lower. Every figure is computed live and updates as filings arrive, so the numbers above may differ from the ones quoted the day this was published.
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Coldpine is a publisher of intelligence on public Congressional disclosures. This guide describes where the disclosures are and how to read them. It is informational only, not investment advice, and not a suggestion to buy, sell, or copy anyone’s trades.