A single congressional stock trade is one data point. The signal is what happens when independent public records — a bipartisan buying cluster, a federal contract, campaign-finance flows, lobbying activity — all point at the same company at the same time. Across 20,053 trades, only 115 climb near the top of that pyramid. Eight reach the apex.
Most tools that track congressional stock trading treat every filing as a tip. A member bought Nvidia; here is the headline. But a single trade, taken alone, is close to noise — across our full corpus, the average congressional purchase slightly trails the market. The information is not in any one trade. It is in convergence: when several independent records, generated by different institutions for different reasons, all happen to point at the same company inside the same narrow window.
We score that convergence in layers. On top of the trade itself, a trade can pick up up to five independent corroboration signals: a bipartisan cluster (members of both parties trading the same ticker in a 30-day window), a federal contract award to the company near the trade, campaign-finance flows from the company tied to the member, lobbying activity on the company, and a corporate-insider (SEC Form 4) filing in the same name. Stack them up and you get a pyramid.
Of 20,053 congressional trades with an identifiable ticker, here is how the corroboration layers distribute. The base is enormous; the apex is almost empty. That shape is the whole point.
Eight trades sit at the top of the pyramid with four corroboration layers each. Every one of them carries the same four: a bipartisan cluster, a federal contract, campaign-finance flows, and lobbying activity — all aligned on the same company. None of the eight carries the fifth layer, a corporate-insider filing. (More on why in a moment.) All eight are House filings.
All trade data above is drawn from public STOCK Act Periodic Transaction Reports, federal contract awards (USASpending), FEC filings, and Senate/House lobbying disclosures. Maria Elvira Salazar appears three times — the most corroborated trader in the dataset by this measure.
The pyramid tops out at four layers, not five, for a structural reason: the insider layer is by far the rarest. Only a small number of trades in the entire corpus land within the window of a matching corporate-insider (Form 4) filing — so the combination of all five signals on one trade simply has not occurred yet. The insider layer is the ceiling, and when it does combine with the others, it will mark a genuinely singular event.
Here is the part that surprised us. The eight apex trades span a conviction score range from 25.9 to 77.2 — from the bottom third of the scale to the top. A trade can light up every available independent record and still score low on conviction, because the two measures answer different questions.
The three-layer tier — 107 trades — is dominated by one name: Microsoft. Through the first half of 2026, a bipartisan, cross-chamber group bought MSFT while a federal contract award to Microsoft landed inside the signal window and lobbying activity on the company ran heavy. The buyers included Josh Gottheimer (D, conviction 87.4), Senator John Fetterman (D, 83.6), Richard McCormick (R, 80.3), Ro Khanna (D, 75.1), John McGuire (R) and David Taylor (R) — both parties, both chambers, the same ticker, the same window. Three independent records stacked on a single company.
That is the pattern the platform is built to surface: not the loudest trade, but the one where the most independent public records quietly agree.
A few words on what these layers mean. Corroboration is not an allegation. A trade reaching the apex of this pyramid is not evidence that any member did anything improper — every record here is a lawful public disclosure, and members trade for many ordinary reasons. What the pyramid measures is convergence: the degree to which independent institutions, acting separately, happen to be pointed at the same company at the same moment.
That convergence is information a single trade cannot carry. It is also the part that is genuinely hard to assemble — it requires joining congressional disclosures to contracts, campaign finance, lobbying, and insider filings on a shared timeline. Everyone can show you the trade. The signal is the graph behind it.
Signal Congress stacks congressional trades against contracts, lobbying, campaign finance, and insider filings — and surfaces the ones where they converge.
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