The STOCK Act: Why Congress members have to disclose their trades within 45 days
Members of Congress and their spouses trade stocks. That has been true for as long as there has been a Congress. What changed in 2012 was that they finally had to tell anyone — within 45 days, in a structured filing on the House Clerk or Senate eFD websites. That law is the STOCK Act.
What the STOCK Act requires
The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 requires Members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children to file a Periodic Transaction Report (PTR) within 45 days of any trade exceeding $1,000.
PTRs disclose the trade date, ticker, transaction type (buy/sell/exchange), and a dollar-value band rather than a precise amount. The bands start at $1,001–$15,000 and step up through $50K, $100K, $250K, $500K, $1M, $5M, $25M, $50M, and 'over $50M.'
The same rules cover roughly 4,000 executive branch officials, but the public datasets that get scraped are typically the House Clerk PTR feed and the Senate eFD eFiles.
The loopholes
45 days is a long time. By the time you see a Senator's January 5 purchase on a February 19 filing, the stock has had six weeks to move.
Dollar bands obscure size. A $1,001–$15,000 purchase and a $14,999 purchase look identical in the data.
Penalties are weak. The standard fine for a late filing is $200. Several members have repeatedly filed months or even years late.
Spousal trades count, but joint accounts complicate attribution. Some members file 'Spouse' on every trade as cover.
What the data actually shows
Studies of post-STOCK-Act Congressional trading (Eggers & Hainmueller 2013, Belmont 2022) find that members do, on average, outperform the market by 1–4% annually. Whether that's information advantage, sector concentration, or noise is contested — but the disclosures themselves are unambiguously public.
High-volume traders tend to cluster: a small number of members account for the majority of disclosed trades. Watching for first-time buys from those known names tends to be more interesting than tracking a dormant member's annual REIT trade.
How InsiderWire reads Congressional disclosures
We pull the House Clerk PTR feed and the Senate eFD eFile listing on a 24-hour cycle. Each disclosed Buy is parsed into a Signal tagged source='congress' with the member's name, chamber, ticker, and dollar band.
Congress signals contribute to cross-source consensus events alongside insider buying and 13F filings — when a Senator and a CEO buy the same ticker in the same week, you see both signals on one wire.
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Educational content. Not investment advice. InsiderWire aggregates publicly-available SEC and Congressional filings — past activity is not a guarantee of future returns.