How to Find Out What Your Congress Member Is Trading

In January 2020, Senator Richard Burr sold between $628,000 and $1.72 million in stock holdings after receiving classified briefings on the severity of COVID-19 — weeks before the market crashed. He was not the only one. Senators Kelly Loeffler, Dianne Feinstein, and Jim Inhofe all made significant trades in the same period. These trades were legal under existing law as long as they were disclosed. The disclosure records were public. Almost no one was looking at them.

That has changed. A combination of new tracking tools, media attention, and public outrage has made congressional stock trading one of the most closely watched accountability issues in American politics. Here is how the disclosure system works and how to use it.

The STOCK Act: What It Requires

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, signed into law in 2012, explicitly prohibits members of Congress and their staff from using nonpublic information for personal financial gain. It requires members, their spouses, and dependent children to report stock transactions exceeding $1,000 within 45 days of the trade.

Before the STOCK Act, members were required to file annual financial disclosures but not individual trade reports. The law was meant to create real-time transparency. In practice, the 45-day disclosure window means that by the time the public sees a trade, the market has often already moved. A senator who trades on advance knowledge of a policy announcement has six and a half weeks before anyone can see the disclosure.

Enforcement has been minimal. The penalties for late filing are $200 per late report — a rounding error for most members. Between 2012 and 2023, the Department of Justice brought exactly one insider trading case against a sitting member of Congress (Representative Chris Collins, who was convicted in 2019 for tipping off his son about a failed drug trial).

Where to Find the Disclosures

Senate: Electronic Financial Disclosure System (EFDS)

Senate financial disclosures, including periodic transaction reports (PTRs), are available at efdsearch.senate.gov. You can search by senator name, filing type, and date range. Each PTR lists the asset traded (stock ticker or description), whether it was a purchase or sale, the date of the transaction, and the value range (reported in broad brackets like $1,001-$15,000, $15,001-$50,000, etc.).

The Senate system also hosts annual financial disclosures that list all assets, income, liabilities, positions, and agreements — providing a complete picture of a member's financial interests.

House: Financial Disclosure Reports

House disclosures are available at disclosures.house.gov. The format is similar to the Senate — periodic transaction reports listing asset, transaction type, date, and value range. House disclosures were historically only available as scanned PDFs, making automated analysis difficult. In recent years, the Clerk of the House has improved the system, but many filings still require manual review.

The 45-Day Delay Problem

The disclosure delay is the central weakness of the STOCK Act. Consider a timeline:

• Day 0: A senator on the Armed Services Committee learns in a classified briefing that a major defense contract will be awarded to Company X.
• Day 1: The senator (or their spouse) purchases $100,000 in Company X stock.
• Day 15: The contract is publicly announced. Company X stock rises 20%.
• Day 30: The senator sells for a $20,000 profit.
• Day 45: The original purchase is disclosed publicly. By now, the trade looks like old news.

Multiple proposals to shorten the disclosure window to 48 hours or ban individual stock trading entirely have been introduced. The TRUST in Congress Act, the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act, and similar bills have all stalled. As of early 2026, the 45-day window remains in place.

What Suspicious Patterns Look Like

Not every trade by a member of Congress is suspicious. Many members hold diversified portfolios managed by financial advisors who make routine trades. The patterns that warrant scrutiny include:

Committee-Relevant Trades

A member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee trading pharmaceutical stocks. A member of the House Financial Services Committee trading bank stocks. A member of the Armed Services Committee trading defense contractor stocks. Committee assignments give members access to nonpublic information about the industries they oversee — trades in those industries deserve extra scrutiny.

Pre-Announcement Timing

Trades that occur within days or weeks before a major policy announcement, regulatory action, or government contract award that moves the stock price. The COVID-era trades were flagged precisely because the timing — sell stocks, then the market crashes — was too consistent to ignore.

Unusual Size or Frequency

A member who typically makes 5-10 trades per year suddenly making 30 trades in a single month, particularly if concentrated in one sector. Sudden shifts from buy to sell (or vice versa) in a sector the member has legislative influence over.

Spousal and Dependent Trades

The STOCK Act covers spouses and dependent children. Some members route suspicious trades through their spouse's account. The disclosure still captures these, but they receive less media attention. Always check spousal trades alongside the member's own transactions.

Tools and Databases

Several organizations and projects have made congressional trading data more accessible:

• Capitol Trades (capitoltrades.com) — aggregates and standardizes disclosure data from both chambers, allowing search by member, ticker, date, and transaction type. Provides alerts for new filings.
• Quiver Quantitative — tracks congressional trades alongside government contract data, lobbying data, and other political intelligence. Offers a "Congressional Trading" dashboard showing recent trades by all members.
• OpenSecrets — maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics, provides personal financial disclosure data alongside campaign finance and lobbying data, enabling cross-referencing.
• Unusual Whales — originally a stock market analytics platform that added a congressional trading tracker, providing real-time alerts and historical analysis of member trading performance versus market benchmarks.
• Effective Governance Tracker (EGT) — a project that maps trades to committee assignments and vote timing, automatically flagging trades that coincide with committee-relevant legislation.

Deep Seer's accountability pipeline integrates congressional financial disclosure data with lobbying filings (Senate LDA), regulatory actions (regulations.gov), and corporate ownership records (SEC Exhibit 21), allowing investigators to trace the full chain from lobbying contact to legislative action to financial trade.

How Members' Portfolios Actually Perform

Do members of Congress outperform the market? Academic research suggests they do — modestly but consistently. A 2004 study by Alan Ziobrowski at Georgia State University found that Senate stock portfolios beat the market by roughly 12 percentage points per year. A follow-up study in 2011 found that the advantage had decreased to about 6 percentage points, possibly due to increased public scrutiny.

More recent analyses using STOCK Act data show mixed results. Some members consistently outperform (notably members on the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committees), while others underperform. The aggregate outperformance has narrowed, but the outliers — members who consistently make well-timed trades in sectors they regulate — remain statistically conspicuous.

What You Can Do

Track your own representatives. Go to efdsearch.senate.gov or disclosures.house.gov and search for your members. Download their periodic transaction reports. Cross-reference their trades with their committee assignments and their voting record. When you see a pattern — a member on the Energy Committee buying oil stocks before a favorable policy announcement — write about it, share it, or report it to the Office of Congressional Ethics.

The data is public. The disclosures are filed. The question, as always, is whether enough people are paying attention to make the transparency meaningful.