Congress stock trading: what the disclosure data actually shows

The mechanics: how Congress trading disclosure works

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act (STOCK Act), signed in 2012, created mandatory real-time disclosure requirements for Congressional stock trades. Before the STOCK Act, lawmakers disclosed trading activity only once a year in annual financial disclosures, with no specific timeline requirement. A trade made in January could stay hidden from the public until the following calendar year.

Under current rules:

• 45-day disclosure window: Members of Congress must disclose purchases, sales, and exchanges of stocks, bonds, commodities, and other financial instruments within 45 days of the transaction date. The report must include the date of the transaction, the asset, and the approximate dollar range (reported in ranges: $1–$15K, $15K–$50K, $50K–$100K, $100K–$250K, $250K–$500K, $500K–$1M, over $1M).
• Covered transactions: The STOCK Act applies to the member of Congress and their spouse and dependent children. It covers stock, bond, commodity, futures, and options transactions where the member's or spouse's financial interest is the primary one. Transactions managed entirely by a blind trust or independent investment advisor are exempt.
• Penalties: The law provides a $200 civil penalty for late filing. In practice, this nominal fine has done little to deter habitual late filers, some members routinely disclose trades months or years after the deadline with small monetary penalties.
• Where to find the data: House filings are available through the Clerk of the House's Financial Disclosure portal. Senate filings are on the Senate's public disclosure site. Multiple third-party aggregators (including RadarPulse's Politics Terminal) compile and normalize these filings for easier navigation.

What the academic research found

Two landmark studies by Ziobrowski, Cheng, Boyd, and Ziobrowski, published in 2004 (Senate) and 2011 (House), analyzed Congressional trading from 1985 to 2001 and found substantial evidence of above-market returns:

• Senate study (2004): Senate portfolios generated abnormal returns of approximately 12% per year above market, compared to typical underperformance among corporate insiders and approximately 1% outperformance among household investors. The abnormal returns were concentrated in stocks purchased around important Senate committee action.
• House study (2011): House members similarly outperformed the market by approximately 6% per year, with the outperformance concentrated in purchases (not sales), suggesting the advantage is more about knowing when to buy than when to sell.
• Post-STOCK Act research: More recent studies analyzing post-2012 data find substantially reduced (and in some cases statistically insignificant) outperformance. The public scrutiny created by mandatory 45-day disclosures appears to have altered Congressional members' trading behavior, either by reducing trading on non-public information, or by members becoming more careful about trades that would attract attention.

The honest read: Congressional trading had a measurable information advantage historically; that advantage appears diminished after mandatory near-real-time disclosure; and the variation across individual members is substantial, some lawmakers consistently transact around legislative events, while many others trade large-cap stocks passively with no apparent informational edge.

What the data shows about Congressional trading patterns

Which sectors dominate

Technology is by far the most heavily traded sector in aggregate Congressional disclosures, reflecting both the concentration of Congressional wealth in tech equities and the heavy legislative attention to technology regulation, antitrust, AI, semiconductors, and data privacy. Healthcare (pharmaceutical approvals, Medicare/Medicaid legislation) and defense (defense budget appropriations) are the next most common. Energy, financials, and real estate also appear regularly.

The sector concentration matters for interpreting the signal: when lawmakers on technology or healthcare committees trade in names their committees are actively considering, the information advantage is most plausible. When lawmakers trade S&P 500 index funds or mega-cap names unrelated to their committee work, the trade is more likely passive portfolio management.

The timing question

The most contested aspect of Congressional trading is timing: are lawmakers trading before market-moving events their committees are creating? The pre-STOCK Act research found strong evidence of this pattern. The post-STOCK Act picture is more mixed:

• Cases where members of relevant committees transacted in sector stocks shortly before major regulatory decisions continue to appear in the disclosure data, generating recurring media scrutiny.
• The 45-day window means any timing advantage is already embedded in the stock price by the time the public sees the filing. A purchase made 44 days before disclosure in a stock that has since risen 15% is already a completed trade; the opportunity has passed.
• Traders attempting to replicate Congress trades face a fundamental problem: the information is backward-looking by the time it's public. Congressional trades are more useful as confirmation of longer-duration sector or name-level positioning than as real-time signals.

Most-traded names in aggregate

The most frequently disclosed names in Congressional trading data year over year are consistently dominated by large-cap technology stocks: Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta. This reflects the intersection of several factors: these are the most widely held stocks among high-net-worth individuals; they are the names most affected by technology policy; and they are the most liquid, making large purchases and sales easier to execute without market impact.

Defense and aerospace names (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, L3Harris, Northrop Grumman) appear disproportionately among members of the Armed Services and Defense Appropriations committees. Healthcare names cluster around members on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Senate HELP Committee. The sector→lawmaker→committee mapping is the starting point for identifying trades where the information advantage is most plausible.

The signal: how to actually use Congressional trading data

Given the disclosure lag and the mixed evidence on post-STOCK Act performance, the clearest applications of Congressional trading data are:

1. Cross-domain confirmation, not standalone trigger. Congressional purchases in a name that also has unusual options flow activity is a stronger signal than either alone. The options market reflects near-term directional conviction; Congressional accumulation reflects longer-duration positioning. Agreement between the two independent signal sources is meaningful. This is what RadarPulse surfaces explicitly in the Flow × Congress overlap panel.
2. Sector-level positioning awareness. Aggregate Congressional buying or selling across a sector, particularly by members on the relevant oversight committees, can provide an early read on legislative tailwinds or headwinds for that sector. Individual trade signals are noisy; sector-level patterns across multiple members are more robust.
3. Committee-specific attention. Not all Congressional trading is equal. A purchase by a member sitting on the Senate Armed Services Committee in a defense contractor the week before a major defense authorization vote carries a different informational weight than a passive purchase of the same stock by a member with no relevant committee assignment.
4. Longer time horizon than options flow. If the thesis is correct, Congressional positioning tends to play out over weeks to months, not days. Position sizing and hold-period expectations should reflect this. Options flow sweeps are week-horizon signals; Congressional accumulation is a month-horizon signal at best.

The STOCK Act's limits and ongoing debates

The STOCK Act improved transparency significantly over the pre-2012 regime, but several structural limitations remain:

• Dollar range reporting, not exact amounts. Disclosures show ranges, not precise dollar figures. A trade disclosed as "$500K–$1M" could be a $501,000 transaction or a $999,000 one, the granularity is insufficient to distinguish a modest rebalancing trade from a significant directional bet.
• 45-day lag. By the time the public sees a trade, up to 45 days have passed. The stock may have already moved substantially in response to the underlying catalyst.
• Enforcement limitations. The $200 civil penalty for late filing has proven insufficient to deter habitual late disclosures. Some lawmakers routinely file months or years after the deadline, limiting the transparency value.
• Spousal and dependent exclusions are broad. Trades executed through "independent" investment managers, even ones a member or spouse selected, may be exempt from disclosure if the member certifies they have no input into trading decisions.
• Legislative proposals ongoing. Multiple bills have been introduced to ban or further restrict Congressional stock trading, from outright trading bans to mandatory blind trusts. The political likelihood and timeline of passage varies with the legislative calendar.

How to monitor Congressional trading

For investors who want to track Congressional disclosures systematically:

• Direct sources: The House Clerk's Financial Disclosure portal and Senate Public Disclosure site are the authoritative sources. They are updated as new filings come in but require manual searching by member name or date range, there is no built-in screening by ticker or sector.
• Aggregators: Services that normalize and aggregate STOCK Act filings make it possible to search by ticker, filter by committee, and see which members are trading which sectors. RadarPulse's Politics Terminal aggregates all disclosed Congress and Senate trades, surfacing unusual clustering by sector and ticker alongside options flow data.
• Alerts on specific names: The most efficient approach for an individual ticker: set up monitoring for any new Congressional disclosure mentioning that ticker, filtered by members on committees with oversight of that sector. Manual monitoring via the official portals is tedious; aggregator alerts are faster.

The cross-domain thesis: flow × politics

The strongest signal in this dataset is not Congressional trading in isolation, it is Congressional trading in combination with unusual options flow in the same name, pointing in the same direction. When both signals appear:

• Congress members are accumulating or reducing a position in a stock (longer-duration equity thesis).
• Large institutional traders are making short-duration directional bets in the same stock's options (near-term catalyst expectation).

These are two independent market signals from independent participants with different information sources and different time horizons, both pointing at the same name. The convergence is the signal, not either data source alone.

RadarPulse surfaces this cross-domain confluence explicitly: tickers where the day's flow includes EXTREME or ELEVATED prints and Congressional trading data shows recent accumulation appear in the Flow × Congress overlap panel (Politics Terminal) and the cross-domain section of the terminal landings.

The committee-to-stock pipeline: how legislative work creates trading opportunities

The most structurally defensible reason to pay attention to Congressional trading is not that lawmakers are reckless or overtly corrupt, it is that the committee system in Congress routinely places certain members at the center of consequential decisions before those decisions become public. Understanding which committees control which policy levers, and which stocks are most sensitive to those levers, is the foundation of interpreting any individual disclosure with appropriate context.

The pipeline works like this: committee assignments determine which members participate in drafting legislation, hold hearings with company executives, review classified procurement documents, and deliberate on regulatory guidance before public announcement. These are not peripheral activities. They are the legislative process. A member of the Senate Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces participates in discussions about multi-year defense contracts, NDAA appropriations language, and classified procurement decisions, often months before any public announcement. The structural information advantage is not incidental; it is built into how the committee system functions.

Each major committee cluster corresponds directly to a set of publicly traded companies whose valuations are sensitive to the committee's decisions:

• Armed Services Committee (Senate) / Defense Appropriations (House): Defense contractors including L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies, and Leidos are the primary exposure. Multi-year contract awards, NDAA appropriations, and classified procurement decisions are the key catalysts. The information lag from committee deliberation to public announcement can be six months to over a year on large programs.
• Senate Finance / House Ways & Means: Pharmaceutical pricing legislation, Medicare drug negotiation lists under the Inflation Reduction Act, and Medicaid reimbursement rates are the dominant catalysts for names like Biogen, Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Eli Lilly. Finance Committee deliberations on drug pricing provisions can directly affect the revenue outlook for entire drug portfolios, information that members are exposed to well before public announcements.
• Senate Commerce / House Energy & Commerce: Technology antitrust enforcement, AI governance frameworks, semiconductor export controls, and data privacy legislation are the relevant catalysts for Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and NVIDIA. These committees hold hearings, receive confidential briefings from FTC and DOJ, and draft regulatory language affecting valuations in names that represent trillions in combined market capitalization.
• Senate Environment & Public Works / House Natural Resources: Federal land leasing decisions, permitting reform, renewable energy tax credit structures, and fossil fuel production policy affect energy companies across the spectrum, from traditional producers like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Occidental Petroleum, to renewables-focused companies like NextEra Energy and Enphase. Energy policy is one of the areas where committee deliberations are most directly connected to commodity prices and company revenues.
• Senate Banking / House Financial Services: Capital requirement changes, CFPB rulemaking, crypto legislation, and systemic risk designations affect major financials including JPMorgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup. Banking committee members often receive confidential testimony from regulators on pending rule changes before those rules are finalized and published.

How to apply this mapping in practice: for any Congressional disclosure you encounter, the first check is the member's committee assignments, available in real time through congress.gov. If the member sits on the committee with direct oversight of the traded company's industry, the trade carries significantly more informational weight than a trade by a member with no relevant committee exposure. A purchase of a defense contractor by an Armed Services Committee member is a categorically different signal than the same purchase by a member from the Agriculture Committee.

The important counterpoint to hold alongside this: most committee members trading in their sector of oversight may be doing so based on sector expertise, they understand the industry well because their committee work requires it, rather than on specific, non-public legislative information. A senator who has spent a decade on the Finance Committee understands pharmaceutical economics deeply; their trades may reflect sophisticated sector knowledge rather than a specific tip. This distinction matters because it affects the precision of any informational thesis you construct from a disclosure. Expertise-based trading and information-based trading can look identical on a public filing.

The committee-to-sector reference framework:

Reading a STOCK Act disclosure: a complete field-by-field guide

STOCK Act disclosures are public filings available to anyone, but they use specific fields and categories that require careful interpretation to extract accurate information. A disclosure that looks like a major directional bet on first glance may be a passive investment plan contribution on closer reading. Conversely, a modestly-sized filing that might appear routine can carry significant informational weight when the member's committee context and timing are understood. Here is a complete breakdown of every field in a standard disclosure:

Filing date vs. transaction date. This is the most important distinction in any disclosure. The filing date is when the member submitted the form to the House Clerk or Senate disclosure office. The transaction date is when the actual trade occurred. The gap between these two dates, up to 45 days by law, sometimes more in the case of late filers, determines how stale the information is by the time the public can act on it. A filing received today that discloses a transaction from 44 days ago means any informational advantage the member had was acted upon nearly six weeks before you saw the disclosure. If the stock has already moved in the direction of the trade, the public information value has been partially or fully realized.

Asset reported. Disclosures list the ticker symbol, the full company name, and the asset type. The asset type is where subtle but important variation exists. Most Congressional trading is in common equity, ordinary stock purchases and sales. Options disclosures (calls or puts) are substantially more unusual and carry higher informational weight when they do appear. An options position requires a specific near-term thesis with a defined expiration date, it is structurally different from a passive equity allocation. When a Congress member discloses an options transaction in a name with direct committee relevance, that is among the most unusual patterns in the entire disclosure universe.

Transaction type. Disclosures use standardized abbreviations: "P" (Purchase), "S" (Sale), "SP" (Sale, Partial), and "E" (Exchange). Partial sales are the most ambiguous to interpret, they could represent profit-taking after appreciation, routine portfolio rebalancing, or the beginning of a position exit. Full sales of a recently purchased position are the most bearish-looking Congressional signals. Exchanges typically reflect corporate actions (mergers, stock splits) rather than directional trading decisions.

Dollar range. The law requires disclosure in bracketed ranges, not exact figures: $1K–$15K, $15K–$50K, $50K–$100K, $100K–$250K, $250K–$500K, $500K–$1M, and over $1M. These ranges matter enormously for signal quality. A $15K–$50K trade in a large-cap stock like Apple or Microsoft is functionally indistinguishable from an automatic investment plan contribution or routine rebalancing, it could be 20 shares bought through a monthly DCA program. A $250K–$500K position in a mid-cap defense contractor is a materially different commitment. As a practical filter: disclosures below $50K in large-cap names are noise for signal purposes; disclosures above $100K in a single name warrant serious examination; disclosures above $250K are potentially meaningful position signals.

Covered vs. excluded transactions. Transactions managed entirely by a qualified blind trust, meaning one where the member has no knowledge of or input into individual investment decisions, are exempt from disclosure. Spousal and dependent children's transactions are covered only when the member "has or obtains" a financial benefit. Many members claim their portfolios are independently managed to reduce public scrutiny, and verifying this claim requires reading the disclosure notes carefully. A member who states all their trading is managed by an independent advisor, then files disclosures listing individual single-stock purchases, creates an interpretive tension worth noting.

Common disclosure patterns and what they signal. Late filings, those submitted after the 45-day window, are labeled as such in the official portals. Late filings can indicate intentional delay, administrative failure, or both; the $200 fine is not a meaningful deterrent. Amended disclosures update a prior filing and may indicate an initial reporting error or a correction filed after public scrutiny. Batch filings, a member disclosing dozens of transactions in a single submission, covering months of activity, almost always represent an automatic investment program or a portfolio that was not being actively monitored for disclosure compliance. Batch filings in large-cap diversified equity are the lowest-quality signals in the Congressional disclosure universe.

The aggregate performance debate: what the latest research actually concludes

The academic literature on Congressional stock trading is considerably more nuanced than the popular narrative on either end of the spectrum. It is neither "Congress always beats the market through insider trading" nor "there is no signal worth examining." The actual research record is a layered story of methodology, time periods, and behavioral change, and understanding the full picture is essential for applying the data correctly.

Ziobrowski et al. (2004), the Senate study. This is the foundational work. Analyzing Senate portfolio data from 1993 to 1998, the authors found that Senate portfolios generated abnormal annual returns of approximately 12% above market benchmarks, using event study methodology that controlled for market returns and size factors. The critical finding within the finding: the abnormal returns were almost entirely concentrated in stock purchases, not sales. This asymmetry is interpretively important, it suggests the edge is in anticipating good news (buying before positive catalysts) more than in avoiding bad news (selling before negative catalysts). Senate members were not simply reacting to information; they appeared to be positioning ahead of it.

Ziobrowski et al. (2011), the House study. Extending the analysis to House member portfolios using 1985–2001 data, the researchers found approximately 6% annual abnormal returns, meaningfully lower than the Senate figure but still statistically significant and well above what passive investors achieve. The same asymmetry held: outperformance was concentrated in purchases. The lower magnitude for House members compared to Senators may reflect the relative power differential between the chambers, the nature of Senate committee assignments (fewer members, more concentrated power), or differences in how members in the two chambers manage their personal finances.

Eggers and Hainmueller (2013), the methodological challenge. This paper challenged the Ziobrowski findings using alternative risk models. The central argument: the earlier studies may have under-controlled for certain systematic risk factors that are particularly relevant to politically connected portfolios. When additional risk adjustments were applied, the abnormal returns shrank substantially, in some specifications, to statistical insignificance. This does not invalidate the original findings; it establishes that the magnitude of any edge is sensitive to methodological choices. The honest summary of the debate is that the advantage was real in the historical data but its precise size remains contested.

Post-STOCK Act studies (2012 onward). The consensus among researchers who have studied Congressional trading in the mandatory-disclosure era is that the outperformance gap has narrowed significantly. Multiple studies find reduced or statistically insignificant abnormal returns after 2012. There are two plausible explanations, not mutually exclusive: first, the behavioral change thesis, mandatory public disclosure changed how lawmakers trade, either by reducing trading on non-public information or by making members more selective about which trades they execute while in sensitive legislative roles; second, the disclosure-kills-the-edge thesis, even if members still hold an informational advantage, the 45-day mandatory public disclosure prevents them from acting on it as freely, and any remaining private advantage is too time-constrained to generate significant portfolio-level outperformance.

The selection bias problem that all studies share. Every study of Congressional trading can only observe the members who actually trade. The most risk-averse lawmakers, or those most aware of the appearance of conflict, may abstain from trading entirely during periods of relevant committee deliberation. If the most informationally advantaged members systematically self-select out of the visible dataset, any observed outperformance across all trading members is a lower bound on the true average informational advantage. The people most likely to have the edge are the least likely to use it visibly.

Practical implications of the research record. The accumulated academic evidence suggests: significant measured advantage historically (pre-STOCK Act), diminished measured advantage post-STOCK Act, substantial member-to-member variation in any period, and a real possibility that the most informationally advantaged members are underrepresented in the observable data. The practical read for monitoring purposes is not to discard Congressional data, it is to weight signals from active traders in legislatively relevant sectors and positions more heavily than passive index buyers, and to treat Congressional signals as confirmation-worthy inputs rather than standalone triggers.

Building a systematic Congressional trading watchlist

Given the volume of Congressional trading activity, hundreds of disclosures across 535 members in active trading periods, attempting to monitor everything produces noise without insight. A systematic watchlist methodology focuses monitoring resources on the disclosures that carry the most potential informational weight and filters out the passive, routine, and unrelated activity that dominates raw aggregate data.

Step 1: Define sector focus using committee mapping. Rather than attempting to track all 535 members of Congress, identify your sectors of interest and then identify the 10–15 members with the most relevant committee assignments for each sector. For any given sector, this means: the committee chairs and ranking members (the most powerful committee positions); the subcommittee chairs with specific jurisdiction over the sector's key legislative issues; and members who have been the most publicly vocal sponsors or opponents of legislation affecting the sector. Your monitoring universe is this focused committee-relevant group, not the full Congressional body.

Step 2: Apply dollar-size filters to eliminate noise. Set a minimum disclosure size threshold of $50,000 (the $50K–$100K bracket). Below this threshold, the trade is almost certainly consistent with passive investment plans, DCA contributions, or routine rebalancing, it carries no useful informational signal. Disclosures above $100,000 in a single name warrant examination. Disclosures above $250,000 are threshold-crossing events where the member is making a deliberate directional commitment that is difficult to explain as routine wealth management. Options disclosures of any size warrant examination due to their structural rarity.

Step 3: Check the timing relative to legislative calendar events. When did the trade occur relative to the committee's publicly known schedule? Committee hearing dates and markups are publicly published on congress.gov. If a member bought a healthcare stock two weeks before their committee held a publicly scheduled drug pricing markup, the timing is analytically relevant. If the trade was six months before any identifiable committee event, the informational thesis is substantially weaker. The legislative calendar is the temporal context that makes Congressional timing meaningful.

Step 4: Cross-reference with options flow data in the same window. For any Congressional disclosure that has passed Steps 1–3, pull up the options flow data for the same ticker covering the 7 days before and after the Congressional transaction date. Two independent signal sources pointing the same direction is categorically more significant than either alone. If unusual institutional options sweeps appeared in the same direction around the same time as the Congressional transaction, you have two separate market participants, with different information sources and different time horizons, aligned on the same name. If the options flow was quiet or pointed the opposite direction during the same window, hold the signal at lower conviction and wait for additional confirmation.

Step 5: Monitor sector clustering across multiple members. A single Congressional disclosure carries limited weight on its own. When three or more members with relevant committee assignments make similar directional trades in the same sector within 30 days, the sector-level signal is substantially more robust than any individual trade. Sector clustering across multiple lawmakers is difficult to explain as coincidence or passive investing; it is more consistent with shared exposure to the same underlying legislative or regulatory development. Aggregated sector-level patterns are the highest-quality signal in Congressional trading data, harder to dismiss and more consistent across time periods than individual member analysis.

Step 6: Set a realistic time horizon for monitoring outcomes. Congressional accumulation takes weeks to months to materially resolve, the underlying catalyst (legislation, regulatory ruling, contract award) typically has its own multi-week or multi-month timeline. Set your monitoring window at 30–90 days from the disclosure date for any signal that has passed the earlier filters. If no identifiable catalyst has emerged within 90 days, the informational edge (if any existed) has most likely dissipated. Congressional trades are not day-trade signals; they are sector and name-level positioning inputs with medium-term resolution horizons.

Case studies: three Congressional trades decoded

Abstract frameworks for evaluating Congressional disclosures become concrete through specific examples. The following three case studies, based on the types of patterns that appear in actual Congressional disclosure data, walk through the analytical process from disclosure to interpretation, illustrating how committee context, trade size, timing, and options flow combine to determine signal quality.

Frequently asked questions

Do Congress members beat the stock market?

Early academic research (Ziobrowski et al., 2004 and 2011) found substantial abnormal returns in Congressional portfolios, approximately 12% annual outperformance for Senators and 6% for House members, relative to the period 1985–2001. Post-STOCK Act research (2012 onward) finds significantly diminished outperformance, suggesting mandatory near-real-time disclosure altered behavior. There is considerable variation across individual members; treating Congressional trading as a universally reliable signal is not supported by the evidence.

Is it legal to trade stocks based on Congress member disclosures?

Yes. STOCK Act filings are public government records, and acting on publicly available information is legal. Trading on material non-public information is illegal, but that would apply to the Congress member trading on non-public legislative information, not to the public acting on already-disclosed data. The disclosure exists precisely to create public accountability.

What stocks do Congress members buy the most?

Technology dominates aggregate Congressional trading disclosures: Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta appear repeatedly. Defense contractors are the second most common category, particularly among members on defense-related committees. The sector concentration reflects both personal wealth allocation patterns and policy exposure, members with committee oversight of a sector tend to trade in names their committees affect.

How long does it take for Congress members to disclose stock trades?

Under the STOCK Act, the deadline is 45 days from the transaction date. In practice, some members file late, occasionally by months, with the $200 civil penalty providing insufficient deterrent. The 45-day window means any informational advantage the member had is already embedded in the stock price before the public sees the trade.

Who are the most active stock traders in Congress?

A small number of lawmakers account for the majority of disclosed transactions. The most publicized names in media coverage tend to be members with significant personal wealth and frequent trading activity, often in technology or healthcare. A more systematic approach is to monitor all disclosures in aggregate, filtering by committee membership and sector clustering, which surfaces patterns across the full universe rather than relying on individual name recognition.

What is the difference between STOCK Act disclosures and insider trading?

STOCK Act disclosures are mandatory public filings, the transparency mechanism. Insider trading is the illegal act of trading on material non-public information. The STOCK Act made it explicitly illegal for lawmakers to trade on non-public legislative information, but enforcement has been limited. The public acting on disclosed Congressional trading data is using public government records, not insider information.

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