Congress disclosures and the STOCK Act windows

Under the STOCK Act of 2012, members of Congress must publicly report trades in stocks, bonds and similar assets made by themselves, their spouse or a dependent child. The report is called a periodic transaction report, or PTR.

The two deadlines#

• Within 30 days of learning about the transaction, and
• no later than 45 days after the transaction itself.

So a compliant report can still describe a trade six weeks old. We mark a trade as late when it was reported more than 45 days after it was made, and each member's page shows their median lag and their count of late trades.

Amounts are ranges#

A PTR never gives an exact amount. It gives a bracket:

We always show the bracket as filed. The midpoint is used only where a single number is unavoidable, such as weighting the follow portfolio, and it is labelled as an estimate.

What we read#

• House of Representatives. The Clerk of the House publishes each electronically filed PTR as a PDF. We read those from 2023 onward and rebuild the transaction table from the text.
• Scanned paper filings have no text to read. They are counted in each run and their trades are not in our data.
• Senate. Senators file in a separate system that we do not read for Follow yet, so senators have no profile or record here.

Each trade shows#

• The member, the asset and whether it was a purchase or a sale, including partial sales.
• The owner: the member, their spouse, a dependent child or a joint account.
• The transaction date and the disclosure date side by side, with the lag in days.
• A link to the filed report.

The record#

A member's record is a follow-the-disclosure portfolio: on the first session on or after each filing date it holds the stocks the member has disclosed buying and has not yet disclosed selling. See How filing-date performance is measured.