How to Track Congressional Stock Trades for Free in 2026

Every member of Congress is legally required to disclose personal stock trades within 45 days of the transaction. That law is the STOCK Act — and buried inside those filings is some of the most valuable (and controversial) trading data available to retail investors.

Here's how to access it, what to look for, and how to cut through the noise.

What the STOCK Act Requires

Passed in 2012, the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act forces senators, representatives, and senior executive branch officials to:

• Report any personal stock trade worth more than $1,000
• Disclose within 45 days of the transaction
• Report the asset, transaction type (buy/sell), and approximate amount

Critically, they are not required to disclose the exact price, number of shares, or their reasoning.

Where the Raw Data Lives

The official sources are free but painful to use:

• House disclosures: disclosures.house.gov — PDFs, manually filed, inconsistent formatting
• Senate disclosures: efts.sec.gov and senate.gov — slightly better but still fragmented
• eFTDS (Electronic Financial Transactions Disclosure System): the underlying EDGAR-adjacent system

Good luck parsing them by hand.

The 45-Day Problem

The single most important thing retail investors miss: by the time a disclosure is public, the trade happened up to 45 days ago.

That means:

• A senator who bought defense stocks before a classified briefing might not disclose for a month and a half
• You're seeing a rearview mirror, not a windshield
• The disclosure lag itself is a signal — longer lags on high-score trades correlate with more suspicious timing

Tools that just show you the trade without flagging the lag are leaving out half the story.

What to Actually Look For

Raw filings alone won't tell you much. The real edge comes from context:

1. Committee overlap A senator on the Armed Services Committee buying Lockheed Martin is very different from a freshman rep doing the same. Committee assignments are public record and map cleanly to sectors.

2. Legislation timing Cross-referencing a trade date against bills the member sponsored, co-sponsored, or voted on reveals patterns the raw data hides.

3. Cluster detection When 3+ members trade the same ticker in the same week, something is almost certainly driving it. Coordinated buys ahead of a sector-specific bill are a recurring pattern in the data.

4. Velocity spikes A member who normally files 2 trades a month suddenly filing 8 in a week is worth watching — that spike often precedes a disclosure that moves markets.

Using Cloakroom

Cloakroom pulls every STOCK Act filing daily, normalises the data, and runs it through Claude AI to generate:

• An Intent Score (0–100) based on committee overlap, legislation timing, and disclosure lag
• A plain-English reason for why the score is what it is
• Cluster detection alerts when multiple members converge on a ticker
• Velocity spike badges when a member's trading pace doubles

The free tier gives you 10 trades with a 48-hour delay — enough to get a feel for the signal. The real-time feed and AI reasons kick in from Starter ($9/mo).

The Bottom Line

Congressional trading data is public, free, and largely ignored by the tools retail investors actually use. The 45-day disclosure lag means you're never going to front-run a senator — but the patterns in the data, when read correctly, are genuinely useful for understanding which sectors the smart money in Washington is rotating into.

Start with the free data. Add context. Look for clusters and spikes. And when you see a 90+ intent score with a 40-day disclosure lag, pay attention.