Methodology

Sources

The roster is the current file from unitedstates/congress-legislators: members, chamber, party, state, district, and committee names. Photos point at the Biographical Directory of Congress. House periodic transaction reports come from the Clerk's annual XML index, filing type P, for 2025 and 2026. Each row links to the Clerk PDF at disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/{year}/{docId}.pdf only after that PDF was actually retrieved. Line items are read from the PDF text layer. Image-only PDFs stay on the feed with the official link and zero guessed trades.

Senate eFD was not scraped. Those seats show an empty book. Vacancies are the gap between 435 voting House seats and the current roster. Nothing on this site is a DEMO trade. If a future scrape fails, the last good JSON snapshot stays up and the feed banner says so.

Two ledgers

Amounts are the disclosed range. The default weight is the midpoint. Conservative uses the low end. Aggressive uses the high end. Treasury bills, cash, TSP, and most mutual funds are excluded from the stock board. Single-name stocks and ETFs stay in.

Member book. Hypothetical return from the adjusted close on the trade date (or the next session if the market was closed) to the latest adjusted close. This is an accountability clock. A follower could not have traded that morning unless they already knew.

Copy book. Hypothetical return from the next session's open after the Clerk filing date to the latest adjusted close. The filing date is treated as public during that calendar day, so the first actionable open is the following session. That is the only book ranked on the board.

Excess return versus SPY (and QQQ on the profile) is the notional-weighted average of each lot's return minus the index return over the same entry and exit dates. Win rate is the share of priced copy-book lots above zero. Late-file rate is the share of equity buys whose filing date is more than 45 days after the trade date. Lots with no price, a stale series, or an entry under $0.50 are counted in the sample size when they are equity buys, and left out of the return.

Winners rules

A member needs at least five equity buys in the trailing twelve months and three priced lots. Rank is copy-book excess versus SPY. The board shows the top decile and the bottom decile. The paper basket is equal weight: the most recent equity buy of each top-decile member, deduped, reconstituted when you run the score worker. It is paper only.

A cluster is three or more members buying the same ticker within 14 days. A whale print is a buy whose midpoint is at least three times that member's own median and at least the $15,001 band. A conflict flag means the ticker's coarse sector overlaps a committee the member sits on. It is labeled overlap, not misconduct.

Prices

Daily bars are Yahoo Finance chart data, split-adjusted closes plus the session open used for the copy book. They are cached in data/prices.json by the scrape worker. This is not a brokerage quote.