A politics terminal for active traders

Why politics belongs in a trading terminal

The link between political activity and market movement is well-documented. Defense contractors move on Armed Services committee markup announcements before the public digest them. Drug pricing legislation drafts move pharmaceutical stocks days before formal introduction. Tariff decisions shift steel, aluminum, and automotive supply chains hours after the first credible reports. Energy permitting executive actions reset exploration company valuations overnight.

None of these are insider trading violations when the information is public, but the window between "public" and "widely processed" can be days or weeks. A retail trader who reads the Armed Services committee markup release at the same time as everyone else gets the same price as everyone else. The edge, to the extent one exists, is in building a systematic watch on political catalysts before they become the dominant narrative in financial media.

That's the purpose of a politics terminal. It keeps the political data landscape visible alongside live prices and options flow, so you're not chasing the move, you're positioned to assess it as it develops.

The velocity problem runs in both directions. Political market moves that are too fast to catch on the first day often remain persistent across the full policy cycle. A tariff expansion announced on a Tuesday that moves steel and aluminum stocks 4 to 6 percent in the opening session may continue affecting those sectors for months as implementation details emerge, retaliatory measures are announced, and the supply chain effect is revised. Getting positioned two days late on the initial spike can still be analytically meaningful if the thesis is structural rather than tactical. The Politics Terminal is built for that structural view: use it to identify the politically-sensitive names before the catalyst, understand why they're sensitive, and evaluate each catalyst faster when it arrives than you could without the context already assembled.

Congressional stock trades tracker

Under the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, members of the House and Senate must disclose trades in individual securities within 45 days of execution. Those Periodic Transaction Reports are public record, and RadarPulse ingests them automatically so you don't have to scrape government filing portals.

The tracker shows you the legislator, the security traded, the transaction type (purchase, sale, or exercise), the approximate dollar range, and the date of the transaction relative to the date of disclosure. That last comparison matters: a trade dated 6 weeks before disclosure is the maximum allowed window; a trade disclosed 2 days after it happened (while technically compliant) suggests a different relationship to record-keeping than one filed on day 44.

More analytically useful than the individual trade is the committee-assignment context. A senator on the Armed Services committee who purchases defense contractor shares is a different signal from a senator on the Agriculture committee buying the same stock. The military procurement connection makes the first trade worth examining further; the second is more likely a general market bet. The tracker surfaces committee membership alongside each filer so you can make that judgment quickly.

The most actionable pattern is sector clustering: multiple members with relevant committee assignments all buying into the same sector within a compressed time window. This appears rarely enough to be meaningful when it does. A single trade is noise. Three trades by Armed Services members in defense contractors in the same 2-week window, during a period when defense supplemental appropriations are under negotiation, is worth noting.

Academic research (Ziobrowski et al., 2004 and 2011) found that Senate portfolios outperformed the market by approximately 12% per year in the 1985-2001 period. Post-STOCK Act research has generally found that systematic outperformance diminished after 2012 when disclosure rules tightened. The tracker puts the disclosed information in your hands so you can form your own view; it doesn't promise that following any individual legislator's trades will be profitable.

One technical detail worth understanding: members sometimes file amendment reports correcting previously submitted PTRs. An amendment to a prior filing may appear in the tracker alongside original filings. The terminal flags amendments so you can distinguish a new trade from a correction to a previously reported one. A member correcting the dollar range from the $50,001-$100,000 bracket to the $100,001-$250,000 bracket is a meaningfully different disclosure than a first-time report of a new purchase. False amendment processing is a common error in raw STOCK Act data feeds; the tracker is built to handle it correctly.

See the full congressional stock trades tracker →

How to read a disclosure without misreading it

The three most common mistakes in reading congressional disclosures are: treating the disclosure date as the trade date, using dollar ranges without acknowledging the range width, and attributing the trade to the member without checking whether it was a spouse account.

The disclosure date and the transaction date can be 45 days apart. A disclosure filed today is a trade that happened up to 6 weeks ago. Price analysis needs to use the transaction date, not the filing date. If you want to know whether the stock moved after the trade, you need the price on the transaction date and the price today. The stock may have already moved significantly between the transaction date and when the disclosure appeared in your tracker.

Dollar ranges are the STOCK Act's second major limitation. The law requires disclosure within one of eight brackets: $1,001 to $15,000; $15,001 to $50,000; $50,001 to $100,000; $100,001 to $250,000; $250,001 to $500,000; $500,001 to $1,000,000; above $1,000,000. A trade in the "$50,001 to $100,000" bracket could be anywhere in a $50,000 range. When someone reports a large legislator is "in $100K of" a stock, the actual position could be $50,001. When someone reports it as a "$1M+ trade," that bracket starts at $1,000,001 and has no ceiling. Both are technically accurate and both may be substantially different from the actual dollar figure.

Spouse accounts appear in a member's disclosure because the STOCK Act requires disclosure of spousal and dependent-child trades. Paul Pelosi's brokerage trades appeared in Nancy Pelosi's PTRs throughout her speakership. Whether those trades reflect any legislative insight is genuinely unknowable from the filing itself. Attributing agency to the member for every spousal trade overstates what the disclosure can tell you.

Trump policy basket

Presidential policy priorities create concentrated sector effects that persist across an entire administration. The Trump policy basket within the Politics Terminal maps the thematic exposures that policy action, deregulation, and executive order activity have historically elevated or depressed.

The basket currently covers six primary sectors: Trump Brand and allied media entities, Energy (domestic fossil fuel production and pipeline infrastructure), Defense (defense contractors and weapons systems), Financials (banks and financial services affected by deregulation), Tariff-sensitive names (steel, aluminum, and domestic manufacturing that benefits from import restrictions), and Crypto (cryptocurrency-related equities and exchange-traded products). A seventh lens covers macro names that tend to respond to broad economic policy sentiment.

For each sector, the terminal shows the constituent tickers, their recent price performance, and how the options flow in those names aligns with the basket theme. A defense sector with elevated call sweeps on multiple defense prime contractors, occurring during a period of increased geopolitical tension and active defense supplemental negotiations, is a different environment from the same sector with low options activity and a neutral to bearish flow bias.

The basket also incorporates official financial disclosures from executive branch figures. Presidential OGE-278 filings (financial disclosure reports) for the current and recent administration are integrated where available, providing context on the financial interests of the executive decision-makers alongside the policy actions their office takes.

The key discipline with the basket is recognizing that it provides context rather than a timing mechanism. Policy-driven sector moves tend to unfold over months rather than days, and they often precede formal legislative action by weeks. The basket is designed for position-awareness and sector monitoring rather than for generating discrete entry or exit signals.

See the full Trump trades tracker →

13F institutional tracker

Every quarter, institutional investment managers with at least $100 million in assets under management must file SEC Form 13F disclosing their long equity holdings as of the last trading day of the quarter. Those filings are public and appear roughly 45 days after the quarter ends, meaning the most recent 13F you can read was filed about the positions the institution held 3 months ago, as of 6 weeks before the filing date.

The RadarPulse 13F tracker parses those quarterly filings and presents them as changes from the prior quarter: new positions (the fund just opened this), additions (they added to an existing position), reductions (they trimmed), and exits (they sold everything). Each change is shown with the number of shares and the approximate dollar value at the filing date, alongside the current price so you can see how the position has performed since it was reported.

The 13F signal is the slowest of the political and smart-money signals in the terminal. A trade you see in a 13F is between 6 weeks and 3.5 months old depending on when in the quarter it was made. A hedge fund that opened a large position in a defense contractor in the first week of the quarter and filed their 13F on the deadline has disclosed information that's been stale for most of the quarter. By the time you read it, the fund may have already exited or significantly modified the position.

Despite the lag, 13Fs are useful for three things. First, they establish a baseline of conviction: a fund that has held a position through multiple quarters is expressing multi-year duration exposure, not a short-term trade. Second, they provide context for interpreting options flow in a name: if a known activist fund just disclosed a large position in a company, elevated call flow in that name takes on a different character than it would in a name with no known institutional sponsorship. Third, they allow you to track which politically-sensitive sectors the largest investment managers are positioning in, which is a meaningful input for understanding the institutional view on policy direction.

The intersection of 13F data and congressional disclosures is particularly revealing. When both an institutional manager with known political access and a senator with relevant committee oversight are simultaneously increasing exposure to the same sector, the combined signal is worth more analytical attention than either one alone. The RadarPulse Politics Terminal shows both data sources in the same workspace, making that cross-reference fast rather than requiring tab-switching across three different government and commercial data sites.

See the full 13F institutional tracker →

Daily AI brief with political context

The morning brief is an AI-generated summary of the day's key market context, built to include the political angles that standard financial media covers inconsistently. It draws on market data, overnight news, congressional filing activity, and the policy calendar to produce a structured read on what the political market environment looks like heading into the session.

The brief follows a consistent format. It starts with the macro picture (equity futures, overnight developments, any significant overnight news that market-moving), then moves to the political layer (any significant congressional disclosures filed overnight, any scheduled congressional hearings, committee markups, or executive announcements on the calendar), and closes with the flow picture (which names are appearing in the unusual options flow with political or policy relevance). The brief is designed to take under three minutes to read, not to be a comprehensive news summary.

The AI component is used for interpretation rather than for fact generation. The prices, the disclosed trades, and the calendar items are real data. The AI synthesizes them into a coherent narrative rather than just listing events. This means the brief can say "defense sector call flow is elevated on three names this morning, occurring alongside a scheduled Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing on the defense appropriations markup" in a way that connects data points a pure data feed would leave unconnected.

The brief is honest about what it does not know. It does not predict how any political development will affect any specific stock. It does not provide a trading recommendation. It identifies the political data that exists, synthesizes the connections between them, and surfaces them as context for your own analysis. The disclaimer is not boilerplate; it reflects a genuine epistemic limit. The brief can tell you that multiple Armed Services committee members filed significant purchases in defense contractors last week. It cannot tell you whether to buy the same names.

Cross-domain signals: politics meets flow

The most differentiated signal in the Politics Terminal is not any single data source, it is the intersection between them. When a ticker appears in both the congressional disclosure data and the live unusual options flow with significant premium on the same side, the conjunction is analytically more interesting than either one alone.

The process for evaluating a cross-domain signal: first, verify that the congressional disclosure was genuine (not a spousal account with no obvious policy connection, not a small bracket trade that is statistically insignificant). Second, confirm the options flow qualifies as unusual by the standard flow metrics: Vol/OI ratio meaningfully above 1, premium above $100,000, aggressor side at or near the ask, and short-term expiration indicating urgency rather than long-dated portfolio overlay. Third, check the committee assignment of the disclosing member against the sector of the stock: is there a logical channel through which that member might have received relevant information through their official role?

When all three checks pass, you have a signal worth spending time on. You still do not have a trade. You have a reason to do research: read the most recent 10-Q, review any recent news about the company, check whether there are any pending legislative actions in the committee where the disclosing member sits, and evaluate the technical picture. The cross-domain signal is a research trigger, not an entry signal.

The Politics Terminal surfaces these intersections automatically. The cross-domain panel within the terminal shows tickers where both congressional disclosure activity and elevated options flow overlap, with the flow score for each, so you can identify which names warrant the deeper look without manually cross-referencing two different data sources.

The most frequent false positive in cross-domain analysis is correlation mistaken for connection. A defense contractor can generate elevated options flow on earnings guidance, a competitor's results, or a supply-chain news cycle that is entirely unrelated to any congressional disclosure. When unusual flow appears the day after a contract award announcement and a senator's PTR on the same stock surfaces from 30 days prior, those may be two independent events. The analyst error is constructing a narrative connecting them when the contract announcement is the clear driver. The discipline of checking whether a broader public catalyst exists for the flow before attributing it to the congressional disclosure filters out the majority of false positives. Confirm timing, confirm relevance, and confirm the absence of obvious alternative explanations before treating the cross-domain match as meaningful.

Committee assignments and sector sensitivity

Building an effective political market watch starts with a committee-sector mapping. Different Senate and House committees have direct oversight or regulatory authority over different sectors. The connection between committee membership and informational relevance to specific industries is the analytical foundation of congressional disclosure monitoring.

The most directly relevant mappings: Armed Services (Senate and House) to defense contractors, aerospace primes, and cybersecurity; Banking Committee (Senate) and Financial Services Committee (House) to banks, insurance, and financial technology; Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (Senate) and Energy and Commerce Committee (House) to pharmaceuticals, biotech, and managed care; Energy and Natural Resources (Senate) and Energy and Commerce (House) to oil and gas, utilities, and renewable energy; Intelligence committees (both chambers) to cybersecurity, satellite communications, and national security-adjacent technology companies.

The less obvious but often more actionable mapping is to the Appropriations committees and their subcommittees. The full Appropriations committees have jurisdiction over discretionary spending across every federal agency and program. The subcommittees (Defense, Labor-HHS-Education, Energy and Water, etc.) have direct authority over the spending levels that drive revenue for their respective sector beneficiaries. A member of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee purchasing defense contractor shares during appropriations season is in a different position than any other member making the same trade.

Use this mapping to build a watchlist: identify 10 to 15 members whose committee assignments give them the most direct policy exposure to the sectors you trade. Monitor their disclosures weekly. When you see a trade from a member with clear sector relevance, give it more weight than the same trade from a member with no relevant committee assignment. This systematic, committee-first approach extracts more signal from the disclosure data than picking the most famous legislators by name.

How to use the Politics Terminal in your daily workflow

The Politics Terminal works best as a background context layer rather than a signal-generation engine. Here is a practical weekly and daily workflow for integrating it.

Every Monday morning: scan the congressional disclosures filed over the weekend. Note any new trades by members with committee assignments relevant to your sectors. Check whether any of those names have elevated options flow in the current live feed. Read the daily brief for the political calendar items for the week: scheduled hearings, markup sessions, executive orders expected, and earnings from politically-sensitive companies.

During the session: use the cross-domain panel to monitor whether any of the names on your congressional watchlist are generating unusual options activity. A stock on your watchlist that shows up in the EXTREME tier of the options flow scanner on the same week that the disclosing member's committee is holding hearings relevant to the company is worth a closer look.

On Fridays: review the Trump basket performance for the week. Which sectors moved, and in which direction relative to any policy developments? If defense moved significantly on no apparent catalyst, check whether there was a committee vote, a contractor announcement, or a procurement decision that didn't get broad coverage. This retroactive review builds your pattern recognition for where political catalysts tend to emerge before they become widely covered.

Monthly: review the committee-assignment list you're monitoring. Members get reassigned, retire, or lose positions with leadership changes. An incoming chairperson of the Armed Services subcommittee who was previously a ranking member has materially different access to classified briefings and procurement deliberations. Update your watchlist accordingly.

What to watch for: political catalysts by sector

Different sectors respond to different types of political catalysts, and the timing of those catalysts follows a largely predictable calendar.

Defense: the annual National Defense Authorization Act markup process runs from spring through fall in congressional terms. Supplemental appropriations requests for active conflicts can move the sector at any time. Watch for Armed Services committee hearings, budget requests from the Pentagon, and any news about major procurement programs. Contractor-specific triggers include earned value management reviews, program delays, and contract competition announcements.

Pharmaceuticals and biotech: FDA advisory committee meetings (the dates are public months in advance), CMS reimbursement rate announcements, drug pricing legislation markup sessions, and executive actions on pharmaceutical pricing are the primary political catalysts. The Inflation Reduction Act's drug pricing negotiation provisions moved multiple large-cap pharmaceutical names significantly and continue to create sector-level pressure through implementation. Watch the Senate Finance Committee and House Energy and Commerce Committee for pharmaceutical pricing legislative activity.

Energy: domestic drilling permit policies, pipeline easement decisions, LNG export terminal authorizations, renewable energy tax credit structures, and offshore drilling moratorium status are the primary political levers for the energy sector. The Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearings and the Department of Energy's regulatory actions are worth monitoring. Executive orders on energy policy can move the sector faster than legislation.

Financial services: bank stress test results, capital ratio rule changes, consumer financial protection bureau enforcement priorities, and fintech regulatory guidance are the dominant political catalysts for financials. The Banking Committee hearings with the Federal Reserve chair and other regulators are worth monitoring not just for the substance but for the tone, since hawkish versus accommodative signals on financial regulation can move sector ETFs meaningfully.

Technology and cybersecurity: government contracts (particularly defense and intelligence agency technology contracts), export control decisions on semiconductor technology, and AI regulatory guidance are the main political catalysts for technology. The intelligence committees and the Commerce Committee both have relevant oversight here. Section 232 and Section 301 tariff investigations affect semiconductor supply chains directly and can move names with China exposure significantly.

Cryptocurrency and digital assets: executive and regulatory posture on cryptocurrency is uniquely volatile in the current policy environment. SEC enforcement priorities, CFTC jurisdiction determinations, banking regulator guidance on crypto custody, and any executive position on a U.S. sovereign digital currency all create discrete movement events for crypto-related equities. Bitcoin ETF assets under management respond directly to SEC regulatory decisions. Exchange stocks and mining companies move on both commodity price changes and the regulatory environment around trading and custody. The crypto sector in the Trump basket is particularly sensitive to any White House statement or agency action, given the policy attention the sector received during the 2024-2025 period. Senate Banking Committee and House Financial Services Committee hearings on digital asset regulation are worth calendaring when they're announced.

Putting the politics terminal in context

Political intelligence is one layer of market analysis, not a complete trading system. The most effective use of the Politics Terminal treats it as a complement to technical analysis and options flow interpretation, not a replacement for either.

A trade thesis built on a congressional disclosure needs a price catalyst to actually move. The disclosure tells you that a senator with a Defense Appropriations subcommittee seat bought a defense contractor two weeks ago. It does not tell you the price is about to move. The price will move when an earnings report, a contract announcement, a budget markup, a media story, or some other broadly visible catalyst gives other participants a reason to buy or sell. Your edge from the congressional data is that you've been watching the name before that catalyst emerged, so you've done the work on the company, you know the legislative environment, and you can evaluate the catalyst faster when it arrives.

That research-ahead approach is the sustainable use case for political market data. Not "follow the Congress member and get rich," but "identify the politically-sensitive names, understand why they're sensitive, and be prepared to act quickly when the catalyst arrives." The disclosure tracker helps you identify which names to watch. The options flow tells you when the market is starting to pay attention. The combination is faster than either alone.

All content in the Politics Terminal, including congressional disclosures, Trump basket data, 13F filings, and the AI brief, is for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes investment advice. Disclosed trades are old by definition; any informational advantage they represented has diminished significantly by the time they're public. Past patterns (academic or anecdotal) do not guarantee future results. Trading and investing involve substantial risk of loss.

Frequently asked questions

Is it legal to trade based on congressional disclosures?

Yes. Congressional disclosures are public records, and using publicly available information for investment research is entirely lawful. The disclosures are designed to be read and used by citizens monitoring potential conflicts of interest. What is illegal is trading on non-public information about congressional trades before they're disclosed, or using information obtained improperly (for example, from a congressional staffer who reveals a pending trade before it's filed). Reading a disclosure on a public government portal or a tracker that ingests those portals is legal.

How current is the congressional disclosure data?

The data reflects publicly filed Periodic Transaction Reports, which can be filed up to 45 days after the trade was made. The tracker shows both the transaction date and the filing date so you can see exactly how old each trade is. This lag is the primary limitation of congressional disclosure data as a near-term trading signal. It is better suited for building long-term sector awareness than for short-term tactical use.

How often is the 13F data updated?

13F filings are quarterly. They cover positions held as of the last trading day of each calendar quarter and are due 45 days after the quarter ends. The tracker reflects the most recently filed 13Fs and shows quarter-over-quarter changes. Between quarterly filing cycles, the 13F data doesn't change (since there are no new filings). The tracker flags new filings as they're processed so you can see when fresh data is available.

What's the difference between the Trump basket and the congressional tracker?

The Trump basket is a sector and theme map, not a disclosure tracker. It groups publicly-traded companies by their exposure to Trump administration policy priorities (energy, defense, crypto, financials, tariffs, and Trump-brand entities) and tracks their performance as a group. It incorporates executive branch OGE-278 financial disclosures where available, but it's primarily a thematic sector view rather than a real-time trade disclosure tracker. The congressional tracker is specifically the STOCK Act disclosure system for members of the House and Senate, with individual trade-level detail.

Can I set up alerts for congressional trades in specific sectors?

Yes. The RadarPulse alert system allows you to set notifications for new congressional disclosures in specific tickers or sectors. You can also combine a congressional disclosure alert with an options flow alert on the same ticker, so you get notified when a name on your congressional watchlist starts generating unusual options activity, without having to monitor both data sources manually.

How accurate is the AI daily brief?

The underlying data points in the brief (market prices, disclosed trades, calendar items) are real and sourced from verified data feeds. The AI is used to synthesize those facts into a coherent narrative, not to generate claims about the market. The brief explicitly states when it is interpreting data rather than reporting a fact. If the AI component fails (API outage, timeout), the brief falls back to a data-only template with the same factual content and no AI narrative. The brief always disclaims that its analysis is for informational purposes and does not constitute financial advice.

What is the Politics Terminal tier requirement?

Congressional trade disclosures are available on the Pro plan and above. The Trump basket and 13F tracker are also Pro features. The AI daily brief is available on Pro and Elite. The cross-domain flow confluence panel requires Elite. The free Basic plan includes access to core flow scoring and a limited view of the political tracking features so you can evaluate whether the full Politics Terminal fits your research process.

How do I know if a congressional trade is a meaningful position size?

The dollar range brackets make precise size impossible to determine, but the bracket midpoint gives an approximation and context from the member's full disclosure history matters more. A member who files at the $50,001-$100,000 bracket in a stock where their other disclosed positions cluster in the $1,001-$15,000 range is expressing more conviction than one whose typical bracket is $500,001-$1,000,000. Look at the filing member's disclosure history over the prior 12 months to calibrate: is this trade large relative to their typical position size, or is it routine? A trade in the top two brackets from a member who usually files in the bottom three is worth more analytical attention than the same trade from a member who routinely operates at that scale.

Is there a difference between Senate and House disclosure patterns?

Yes. Senators on 6-year terms tend to build longer-duration positions; House members on 2-year cycles show more transaction turnover. Senators also carry broader committee assignments (often 3 or 4 committees) compared to House members who typically serve on 2. The seniority structure in the Senate means a ranking member on the Armed Services committee may receive classified briefings that a junior House member on the same committee does not. For higher-conviction signal, senior senators with full-committee rather than subcommittee jurisdiction tend to generate the most analytically significant disclosures. House members on the Intelligence and Appropriations subcommittees are an exception: those positions carry informational access that rivals most Senate assignments, so committee role remains more predictive than chamber alone.

Explore the politics terminal modules