RadarPulse: an alternative to CapitolTrades
Both tools read the same source. Congressional disclosures are public filings, so no tracker has better data than another one; what differs is what you can do once the filing is on screen. RadarPulse scores each disclosed ticker against three other public records and ranks members by what their disclosed trades would actually have returned.
On the honesty of this page. Everything below describes RadarPulse in specifics that can be checked against the product. For CapitolTrades we note only what is widely and publicly known, that it is a dedicated tracker for US Congressional stock disclosures, and otherwise leave the column blank rather than guess at a feature list or a price that may have changed. Check their own site for the authoritative version, and compare the two directly.
The same filings, so the question is what comes next
Members of Congress report their transactions under the STOCK Act, and those reports go into a public feed. Every tracker in this category, RadarPulse included, is reading that same feed. Anyone claiming a proprietary source for Congressional trades is selling you something the government already published.
So a comparison that lists "tracks Congressional trades" as a differentiator is not a comparison. The useful question is narrower: given a filing that is public, late and imprecise, what does the tool do to make it worth acting on?
Our answer is public, and it is graded
Any tracker can add another filter. The part that is hard to copy is publishing whether the scoring worked. RadarPulse grades its own board at radarpulse.io/proof: every scored signal, the move that followed, hits and misses in the same table, with a SHA-256 fingerprint of each published board so the record cannot be quietly edited afterwards.
It is worth being exact about the state of that page today. The options feed is not funded right now, so nothing has been graded yet, and /proof says that on its own face rather than showing an empty table and letting you assume. A tool that will not tell you when it has nothing to show is not a tool that will tell you when it was wrong.
The Congressional side of the same idea is on this page already: members are ranked by what their disclosed trades would actually have returned, priced against real closes, with the trades that could not be priced counted rather than dropped.
What a disclosure actually contains, and what it leaves out
Three properties of the filings shape everything built on top of them:
- They are late by design. The reporting window runs up to 45 days after the transaction. By the time you read it, the position may be larger, smaller or gone.
- The amounts are ranges, not numbers. A disclosure reports a bracket such as $1,001 to $15,000. There is no exact position size in the filing, so any tool showing you a precise dollar figure has estimated it.
- There is no reason attached. A filing records that a trade happened. It says nothing about why, and nothing about whether any other participant sees the same thing.
The first two are hard limits nobody can engineer around. The third is where the difference between these tools lives.
What RadarPulse adds on top of the filing
RadarPulse treats a disclosure as one of four public records and computes a 0–100 confluence score for each ticker from whichever of them have something to say:
- Unusual options flow, each print scored on volume against open interest, premium, days to expiry and moneyness.
- The Congressional disclosure itself.
- 13F institutional holdings, quarter over quarter, including new positions and full exits.
- Federal lobbying spend from Senate LDA filings, scored on the change rather than the level, so the largest spenders do not simply rank highest forever.
A ticker carrying a disclosure and nothing else scores low, which is the honest answer. A ticker where a filing, a scored options print and a fund position all point the same way scores high, and that agreement is the thing no single record shows. The board is public at /confluence, so you can read the output before deciding whether the idea is worth anything to you.
Members ranked by what their trades returned
Most Congressional trackers rank by activity: who filed the most, who traded the largest brackets. Activity is not performance. RadarPulse also ranks members by realized paper return, replaying each member's disclosed trades in date order against real closing prices from an equal-weighted $100,000 paper wallet, so a member who traded rarely and well can outrank one who traded constantly.
Two things about that number, stated up front. It is a paper record, because the filings give brackets rather than position sizes, so it can never be a claim about a member's actual portfolio. And a trade RadarPulse could not price, because the symbol falls outside the price coverage or the date could not be resolved, is counted as a skip and shown as one rather than quietly dropped to flatter the result.
A factual feature comparison
The RadarPulse column is specific because it is ours to describe. The CapitolTrades column is deliberately not.
| Capability | RadarPulse | CapitolTrades |
|---|---|---|
| Positioning | Cross-domain signal terminal built on options flow | Dedicated Congressional trading tracker |
| Congressional trade tracking | Yes, from the public STOCK Act disclosure feed | Yes, the product's core focus |
| Per-politician tracker pages | Yes, one per covered member, live-hydrated, listed on /trackers | See their site |
| Members ranked by realized paper return | Yes, replayed against real closes, skips counted | See their site |
| Unusual options flow, scored 0–100 | Yes, on every print: Vol/OI, premium, days to expiry, moneyness | See their site |
| 13F institutional holdings | Yes, quarter-over-quarter with new positions and full exits | See their site |
| Federal lobbying spend as a signal | Yes, from Senate LDA filings, scored on change rather than level | See their site |
| Cross-domain confluence score | Yes, one 0–100 number combining the records above | See their site |
| Public, graded signal record | Yes, at /proof, including the misses | See their site |
| Live data-status page | Yes, at /trust, reading actual system state | See their site |
| Free tier without an account | Yes: the Academy and the $100K paper wallet, no signup, no card | See their site |
| Options flow latency | 15-minute delayed on every plan today; real-time is not enabled for anyone | See their site |
| MCP server for AI agents | Yes, plus llms.txt | See their site |
Where RadarPulse is weaker, stated plainly
A comparison page that only lists strengths is an advertisement. These are real:
- Options flow is 15-minute delayed on every plan. Real-time OPRA data is a cost this product does not carry today, and no tier buys around it. If you trade intraday off the tape, that is disqualifying and you should know it before signing up rather than after.
- A focused tool can be the better tool. If all you want is to browse Congressional filings quickly, a tracker built for exactly that is a reasonable choice, and the extra records RadarPulse layers on are weight you are not asking for.
- No GEX, DEX, Vanna or dark-pool prints. Those need an options-chain and off-exchange feed that is not connected. The gap is listed on /trust with the reason.
- The paper return is paper. It replays disclosed trades against real closes at an equal weight, which is a model of a member's decisions, not a reconstruction of their portfolio. Disclosures do not contain the position sizes that would make the latter possible.
Try it before paying, without an account
The Academy and the $100K paper-trading wallet are free, permanently, and need no signup and no card. That is deliberate: you can learn how options flow is scored and practise against it before deciding whether any of this is worth money to you.