Glossary / Disclosure & flow

Congressional trade disclosure

Also called: STOCK Act · congress trading · congressional trades

US members of Congress and certain senior staff are required to disclose transactions in securities under the STOCK Act. Each periodic transaction report names the security, the transaction type and the date, with the size given as a broad value band rather than an exact amount.

How it is measured

How is congressional trade disclosure measured?

Filings are due within 45 days of a transaction. The disclosed amount is a range — the bands are wide, and the widest is open-ended at the top — so aggregating filings produces an estimate with substantial uncertainty rather than a precise total. Filings are submitted per person, so a household's activity may appear across several documents.

Why it matters

Why does congressional trade disclosure matter to a swing trader?

These filings are followed closely because of who is filing rather than because of demonstrated informational content, and the honest framing is that the data is interesting rather than proven. The mechanical limits are real: the reporting deadline is generous enough that a disclosure can arrive well after the market has already absorbed whatever prompted it, the value bands are too wide for position sizing to be inferred, and many transactions are executed by advisers under arrangements the filer does not direct.

In Tapeline

Does Tapeline use congressional trade disclosure?

Tapeline ingests congressional disclosures and publishes them as their own Premium feed. The methodology page for Smart Money states explicitly that this data is not an input to that sub-score today.

Tapeline publishes the six factor names and the ordering of their weights. The numeric weights, the scoring equation and the band edges are not published.

Related

See this in the product

Congressional trades feed · Full methodology

Related terms

SEC Form 4
Form 4 is the filing corporate insiders submit to the SEC to report transactions in their own company's securities.
13F filing
A 13F is a quarterly report that institutional investment managers exceeding a size threshold must file with the SEC, listing their US-listed equity positions as of the quarter end.
Accumulation / distribution
Accumulation describes building a position gradually over many sessions to avoid moving the price; distribution describes unwinding one the same way.
Composite score
A composite score blends several separate measurements into a single number on a common scale.

Back to the full glossary.

General information about market vocabulary, written to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. Not investment advice — see the risk disclosure.