Every time a member of Congress buys or sells a stock, they must file a Periodic Transaction Report under the STOCK Act — the public record that makes it possible to track congress stock trades. Most people glance at the ticker and move on. That's leaving most of the signal on the table. Here's what every field actually means, and how to use it to follow congressional stock trading yourself.
The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012 requires members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children to report any stock transaction over $1,000 within 45 days of the trade date. The filing is called a Periodic Transaction Report, or PTR.
Before 2012, members of Congress had no legal obligation to disclose their stock trades publicly. The STOCK Act changed that — and created the data pipeline that Signal Congress and other platforms are built on.
Every PTR contains two dates that traders often conflate, but they measure very different things.
This is the date the trade actually occurred — when the order was executed in the market. This is the date that matters for price context: if you want to know what price a member paid, you look up the stock's price on the transaction date.
This is the date the PTR was submitted to the relevant government system — the House Clerk for House members, the Senate eFD system for senators. The STOCK Act allows up to 45 days between transaction date and filing date.
The gap between these two dates — the disclosure lag — is one of the most underrated signals in congressional trading data. We'll cover that below.
PTRs do not require members to disclose exact trade values. Instead, they select from a standardized set of dollar ranges:
For conviction scoring purposes, we use the midpoint of each range as a proxy for position size. A Range G trade ($1M–$5M) gets a significantly higher size weight than a Range A trade ($1K–$15K) — because a sitting senator spending seven figures on a single stock is a materially different signal than a $5,000 retail-scale position.
PTRs use standardized codes for the type of transaction. The three you'll see most often:
Signal Congress clusters purchases only — sells are excluded from bipartisan cluster scoring because a group of members simultaneously selling the same stock has a different (and noisier) interpretation.
PTRs cover more than common stock. The asset type field is easy to overlook but materially affects how to interpret a filing:
ST (Stock/Equity) — Common shares. This is the primary signal category. A direct purchase of ticker XYZ.
OP (Options) — Call or put options. Members are required to disclose option purchases too. Options trades are significantly noisier signals: the strike, expiry, and whether it's a call vs. put all affect interpretation, and this detail is often missing from the PTR itself.
MF (Mutual Fund) — Mutual fund purchases. Almost always noise — a member rebalancing a 401(k) into a broad fund is not a signal about any individual holding.
Other (OT) — Catch-all: bonds, ETFs, real estate investment trusts. Read the description field carefully — ETF purchases are sometimes labeled OT.
The STOCK Act allows 45 days between trade and disclosure. Members who file within 10 days could have filed at any time in that 45-day window — they chose to file quickly.
In our analysis of 21,699 congressional stock trades from 2018–2026, trades disclosed within 10 days of the transaction date outperformed the S&P 500 by +2.88% at 60 days. Trades disclosed in the final week before the 45-day deadline outperformed by just +0.41%.
This is one of five dimensions in Signal Congress's conviction score. A 3-day disclosure lag on a large purchase contributes significantly more to the score than a 44-day lag on the same trade.
If you want to read PTRs directly from the source:
House members: Go to disclosures-clerk.house.gov. The Financial Disclosure section lists PTR filings by member and year. Individual filings are downloadable as PDFs. The XML index for programmatic access is at disclosures-clerk.house.gov/FinancialDisclosure.
Senate members: Go to efts.senate.gov. Senate disclosures are structured differently — search by senator name or year. The Senate eFD system is slower to update than the House Clerk but covers the same filing obligations.
The raw PDFs are scanned government forms. Parsing them manually is tedious — table alignment varies, tickers are sometimes abbreviated or misspelled, and the same member may file dozens of trades in a single PDF.
The raw disclosure tells you: who, what ticker, what type, what size range, and when. That's enough to know a trade happened. It's not enough to know whether to pay attention.
Signal Congress adds the layer that converts disclosure data into actionable signals:
A STOCK Act disclosure is a legal document, not a trading signal. The transaction date, filing date, amount range, and asset type each carry information — but extracting signal from noise requires the full picture: who filed it, how quickly, on which committee they sit, and whether anyone else from the other party made the same bet at the same time.
To see these fields come together in a real case, read our reconstruction of the NVDA congressional cluster of 2025 — a seven-member bipartisan buy where disclosure lag, committee alignment, and cluster timing all pointed in the same direction simultaneously.
That is exactly what Signal Congress is built to show you.
Every trade in Signal Congress shows the conviction score, disclosure lag, committee relevance, and cluster status — all the context you now know how to read.
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