How to track congress stock trades, step by step

After this post you will be able to find any member of Congress's stock trades on the official filing sites, read a periodic transaction report line by line, and know which parts of it a headline usually gets wrong. You need a browser and about ten minutes per member. Supercycle's Pelosi tracker is the worked example, because it does the same steps in public and links every row to its filing.

The part most guides skip is what a filing does not tell you. It gives a dollar range instead of an amount, a trade date instead of a price, and nothing about the position before or after. The last half of this post is about reading around those gaps.

What does the law actually require?

The STOCK Act, signed April 4, 2012, added a prompt-reporting rule to the Ethics in Government Act. Members of Congress, senior staff and senior executive-branch officials must file a report of any securities transaction over $1,000 "not later than 30 days after receiving notification of any transaction ... but in no case later than 45 days after such transaction". The same law required the House and Senate to put those reports online. The reports cover the filer, their spouse and dependent children, and the House Ethics Committee's guidance states the two deadlines the same way: 30 days from being made aware of the trade, 45 days from the trade.

In a periodic transaction report	Not in it
Asset name, and usually the ticker	The price paid or received
Purchase, sale, or exchange	The size of the holding before or after
A dollar range, such as $1,000,001 to $5,000,000	The exact amount
Trade date and filing date	The reason for the trade
Owner: self, spouse, dependent child, or joint	Who made the decision
Options, with strike and expiry, if the filer includes them	Whether the options were exercised or expired

Two form types matter. The periodic transaction report, or PTR, is the trade-by-trade filing this post is about. The annual financial disclosure lists holdings once a year in ranges and is the only place to see a position's size at all.

Step 1: Find the member's filings

1. House members: open the Clerk of the House's financial disclosure search, choose the filing year and type the last name. Filter the results to "PTR". Each row opens a PDF.
2. Senators: open the Senate's eFD search, accept the notice, and search by name with "Periodic Transaction Report" as the report type.
3. Spouses and dependent children file under the member's name, so one search covers the household.

You should now see a list of PTRs with filing dates, newest first, each linking to the report.

Step 2: Read one report line by line

Open the newest PTR. Every transaction is a row with the same fields. Here is one from Pelosi's August 21, 2026 filing, as the tracker parsed it:

Field	Value	What it means
Owner	SP	Spouse
Asset	Bloom Energy Corporation Class A Common Stock	Ticker BE
Type	P	Purchase
Date	2026-07-24	The trade date, not the filing date
Amount	$1,000,001 to $5,000,000	A range; the filing never gives the figure
Description	Purchased 10,000 shares	Optional detail; not every filer adds it
Filed	2026-08-21	28 days after the trade

The same filing carries a second row for the same day: 100 call options on Bloom Energy with a $100 strike, also a spouse purchase in the $1,000,001 to $5,000,000 range. A share purchase and a call purchase on the same day is a larger position than either row suggests, and a tracker that only counts shares misses half of it.

You should now be able to read any row into six facts: who, what, bought or sold, when, roughly how much, and when it became public.

Step 3: Convert the range into what it can and cannot tell you

The ranges are wide by design. The bands run $1,001 to $15,000, then $15,001 to $50,000, and so on up to $1,000,001 to $5,000,000, $5,000,001 to $25,000,000 and above. A trade in the top band could be five times larger than another trade in the same band.

Two things the range can tell you. First, relative size: across the 38 AI-universe transactions on the Pelosi tracker, 14 are in the $1 million to $25 million bands and 3 are under $100,000, so the household's AI trades are large by any private investor's standard. Second, direction: 27 purchases against 11 sales over the same period. What the range cannot tell you is the size of the position afterward. A $1 million sale of a stock held at $20 million is a trim; of a stock held at $1.2 million it is an exit. Only the annual disclosure, in ranges again, can tell you which.

You should now treat every dollar figure in a congress-trades headline as the bottom of a band.

Step 4: Check the dates, both of them

Every row has two dates, and the gap between them is where copying goes wrong. The trade happened on the transaction date. It became public on the filing date, up to 45 days later. On the Pelosi tracker the gap runs from 2 to 30 days, with a median of 24, and none of the 38 rows was filed late. Not every member files inside the window, so check the gap on every row.

Before reading anything into a row, check what the stock did between the trade date and the filing date. A purchase that is up 20 percent by the time it is disclosed is a different fact from one that is flat, and most of the coverage of any member's trades is written on the filing date, weeks after the trade.

You should now know how stale each row is and whether the filer was inside the 45 days.

Step 5: Read the owner and the options

The owner column matters more than most trackers admit. On the Pelosi tracker every one of the 38 rows is SP, spouse: the account of her husband, the investor Paul Pelosi. The filing records who owns the account and nothing about who decided the trade; the disclosure rule covers spouses regardless. A row marked DC is a dependent child's account, and JT is a joint one. A member whose rows are all self-owned is a different signal from one whose rows are all spousal, and the filing tells you which.

Options need a second look. 14 of the 38 rows on the tracker are options, mostly long-dated calls: on NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon, Bloom Energy, Intel and others. A call purchase is a bet with a date attached. The filing gives the strike and the expiry, so you can see how far from the money the bet was placed, and it does not tell you what happened to it after.

You should now be reading each row as a decision by a specific person with a specific instrument, not as "Congress bought X".

Step 6: Filter for the theme you care about

A raw filing lists every asset: index funds, municipal bonds, a hotel LLC. Supercycle's version of the filter is the AI buildout. The Pelosi tracker keeps only the rows whose ticker is in the 508-stock universe, attaches the AI Exposure Score to each, rolls them up by stock, and links every row to the PDF it came from. The by-stock table is where a pattern shows: NVIDIA appears most often across the period, followed by Apple, Bloom Energy, Alphabet and Amazon, and the most recent filings are concentrated in Bloom Energy, a fuel cell maker in the power layer, and Intel.

The tracker refreshes weekly from the Clerk's site, parsing the PDFs by script, and the data-as-of date is shown at the top of the page. Anything it cannot parse is left out rather than guessed, which is why the source filings section on the page exists: the PDF is the record.

You should now be able to go from a member to the theme, and from a stock's page to the members who traded it.

Step 7: Compare with the other public disclosure

Congress filings and 13F filings are the two windows into what informed money is doing, and they show opposite things. A 13F is a quarterly snapshot of holdings with no trades; a PTR is a stream of trades with no holdings. A stock that shows up in both, bought by a concentrated fund manager and by a congressional household in the same quarter, is a stronger signal than either alone, and the investor pages put the 13F side beside the same tickers.

You should now have both disclosure feeds on the same list of names.

What to watch

Filing dates lag trade dates by up to 45 days, so an August filing describes July and a November filing describes October. The next thing to watch on the Pelosi tracker is whether the Bloom Energy position that arrived in the August filing grows, sells or exercises, and whether the annual disclosure, due each May, shows the size it reached. The tracker will show the filing the week it lands, and the PDF beside it.