Congress stock tracker — and whether copying it actually works

Members have up to 45 days to disclose a trade. So there are two possible entry dates, and only one of them is real:

• The disclosure date — when the public can actually see it. This is the only tradeable date, and it's our default.
• The trade date — when the member actually traded. Entering here means front-running a filing that doesn't exist yet. It is impossible, and we ran it anyway as a deliberate best-case bound.

The finding that matters: even the impossible version loses. Granting the strategy perfect foresight of every filing lifted it to just 1.1% of tickers beating buy-and-hold. The lag isn't what's killing this signal — the signal is.

A scoreboard is only worth what its coverage is, so here is ours, measured rather than assumed. We pulled all 966 Periodic Transaction Reports the House Clerk indexed for 2024 and 2025 and converted 100.0% of them. 55.8% contained at least one ticker-bearing trade.

We audited a random sample of the filings that produced nothing (n=40, fixed seed 1337): 70.0% genuinely held no listed stock — they were bonds, funds, or real estate — and 0.0% were trades we missed.

Our known blind spot: ~13% of PTRs are scanned images; no OCR applied. Those filings are photographs of paper, and we do not currently read them. If a member files only on paper, they are invisible to this page — and we would rather say so than quietly round our coverage up to 100%.