How to read a Congress trade disclosure
Every row in the table comes from a Periodic Transaction Report, the short form a member files after a trade. The forms are simple, but a few fields trip people up the first time they look at one.
| Field | What it means |
|---|---|
| Amount | A dollar band picked from the form, such as $1,001 to $15,000 or $1,000,001 to $5,000,000. The exact size is never disclosed. |
| Owner | Self, Spouse, Joint or Dependent. Spouse trades count, which is why some of the most watched filers rarely trade in their own name. |
| Traded / filed | The trade date and the date the report was filed. The gap between them is shown under each row. Up to 45 days is legal. |
| Partial sell | The member sold part of a position and kept the rest. |
| Exchange | One holding was swapped for another, often in a merger or a fund conversion. |
Options trades show up too. They carry the underlying ticker, and the asset description usually spells out the strike and expiry, so check it before you read a call purchase as a plain stock buy.
Where the data comes from
ChartingLens reads the public filings directly. House reports come from the House Clerk's financial disclosure site, where each PTR is a PDF. Senate reports come from the Senate's electronic financial disclosure system. The President's trades come from Form 278-T filings with the Office of Government Ethics. New filings are checked every two hours.
A few honest limits. Reports filed on paper and scanned in are skipped for now, which is roughly one in seven House and Senate filings. Some rows have no ticker because the asset is a bond, a private fund or an LLC. Those are hidden while Stocks only is ticked. And because the law allows a 45-day delay, nothing here is real time in the way a price feed is. It is as current as the filings.
How traders actually use this list
Most people do not copy trades one for one. The delay makes that a weak plan. What tends to be more useful:
- Clusters. When several members from different committees buy the same name in the same few weeks, that is worth a look. The most-bought panel is built for exactly this.
- Size outliers. Sort by largest amount. A member who normally trades in the $15,000 band and suddenly files a $1,000,001+ purchase stands out.
- Sells into strength. Filter to sells and compare them with the chart. Selling after a long run often just means profit-taking, but it is good context.
From there, open the ticker on a chart and do the normal work: trend, levels, volume, earnings dates. Our guide on how to track politician stock trades walks through that process, and if you want to compare it with corporate insiders and hedge funds, read how to track insider trading and hedge fund managers.
Following Congress trades in ChartingLens
Inside the chart app, the Hedge Fund Holdings panel has a Politicians tab next to the 13F hedge fund portfolios. You pick which members to follow, and the panel shows their disclosed trades beside your chart. Click a ticker and the chart switches to it.
The tab adds three views this page does not have: Recent Trades across everyone you follow, Overlaps for stocks that two or more tracked members traded in the last 12 months, and Performance, which measures the return since each disclosed buy against the S&P 500 over the same windows. The Politicians tab is part of the paid plans. This tracker page stays free.
For two of the most searched filers there are dedicated walkthroughs: tracking Nancy Pelosi's stock disclosures and tracking the President's 278-T trades. If you are building a list of names to follow from what you find here, how to build a stock watchlist is a good next step.