What is the STOCK Act?

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 affirmed that insider-trading law applies to members of Congress and required them to disclose individual securities trades over $1,000 within 45 days, via a Periodic Transaction Report. A common misconception is that it banned members from trading single stocks. It did not. It only mandated disclosure.

Does following congressional stock trades beat the market?

The evidence is mixed. Ziobrowski et al. (2004) found US Senators' purchases beat the market by roughly 10% a year in the 1990s, with a weaker House effect in their 2011 follow-up. But Eggers and Hainmueller (Capitol Losses, 2013) found congressional portfolios actually trailed the market once measured more broadly. More recent analyses find that as a group Congress does not consistently beat the S&P 500, even if a handful of members post standout years. The 45-day disclosure lag also means any edge is stale by the time the public can copy it.

Why is the Congress Trades feed separate from MoatMap's insider trades?

A politician trading a company they do not run is a different signal from a CFO buying their own stock. Congressional trades are kept out of the StockRank, the per-stock insider history, and the cross-market insider union. They live in their own feed so the two signals are never confused.

Congress Trades: What Politicians Buy, and Whether Copying Them Works

June 26, 2026·5 min read

Every member of the US Congress votes on tax, defense, health, and antitrust policy that moves whole sectors. Many of them also hold individual stocks. Since 2012 they have had to tell you what they trade. We added a feed for it. The link is /insider-trades/congress, covering both the Senate and the House.

Before you treat it as a money machine, the honest version: the evidence that copying Congress beats the market is weaker and more contested than the headlines suggest. This post covers the law, what the research actually found, and how to read the feed.

The Law: The STOCK Act

The relevant statute is the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012, the STOCK Act. It did two things. It affirmed that the ordinary prohibition on insider trading applies to members of Congress and their staff, who routinely see market-moving information before the public does. And it required them to publicly disclose any securities trade over $1,000 within 45 days, through a filing called a Periodic Transaction Report.

What it did not do is ban members from owning or trading individual stocks. That is the most common misunderstanding. A senator can still buy a defense contractor the week before voting on a defense budget. The STOCK Act’s bargain was transparency, not prohibition. Reform bills to go further, up to a full ban on single-stock ownership, have been proposed repeatedly and have not passed. So the disclosures exist precisely because the trading is still allowed.

Does Following Congress Actually Work?

This is where it gets less exciting than the Pelosi-tracker memes imply. The case for an edge starts with Ziobrowski, Cheng, Boyd and Ziobrowski (2004), who found that US Senators’ stock purchases beat the market by roughly 85 basis points a month, close to 10% a year, over the 1990s. Their 2011 follow-up found a smaller but still positive effect in the House. For a while, the data looked like politicians had an information advantage and were using it.

Then the counter-evidence arrived. Eggers and Hainmueller, in a study pointedly titled Capitol Losses (2013), used broader holdings data and found that congressional portfolios actually trailed the market modestly. More recent analyses, including the annual scorecards that circulate each year, reach a similar conclusion: as a group, Congress does not reliably beat a plain S&P 500 index fund. A handful of members post eye-catching years, often through megacap tech or options and often in a spouse’s account, and those are the trades that go viral. The median member is unremarkable.

There is also a structural problem for anyone trying to copy the trades: the 45-day lag. By the time a Periodic Transaction Report is public, the catalyst that may have prompted the trade is often already priced in. The two copy-Congress ETFs that launched in 2023 to do exactly this have roughly tracked the index rather than crushed it, which is about what the lag and the mixed evidence would predict.

The fair summary: treat congressional trades as an accountability and curiosity signal first, and a potential alpha source a distant second. The interesting cases are not the aggregate but the specific: a member loading up on a company in an industry their committee oversees, or a cluster of trades clustered suspiciously close to a vote or a hearing.

How the Feed Works

The data comes straight from the official systems: the Senate eFD and the House Clerk’s disclosure portal. Both chambers are in one feed, filterable by chamber. Each row shows the member, their party and state, the ticker (resolved to the listed company where the disclosure names one), the direction, and the disclosed dollar range. Congress reports amounts in brackets, never exact figures, so we show the bracket and never invent a precise number.

One deliberate choice: Congress Trades sits in its own feed. It is kept out of the insider trades section, the per-stock deep dives, and the StockRank. A senator buying a company they merely legislate over is a different thing from that company’s own CFO buying shares, and blending the two would muddy a signal that the research actually supports. They stay separate on purpose.

Browse it at /insider-trades/congress. Read it for what it is: a public ledger of what the people writing the rules are doing with their own money. Whether that makes you money is a separate, and much harder, question.