Last updated: April 4, 2026
We collect financial disclosure filings directly from official government sources, including the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, and the SEC. Our systems continuously monitor these sources for new filings and process them as they become available.
Many government filings — particularly from the House — are submitted as scanned documents with inconsistent formatting. We use advanced extraction techniques including AI-powered processing to convert these into structured, searchable data. Every extracted record is validated before being published to the platform.
Filings identify securities by company name, not ticker symbol. We use proprietary matching algorithms to resolve company names to the correct ticker symbols, including handling of mergers, acquisitions, name changes, and delisted securities. Matches that fall below our confidence threshold are flagged for manual review and excluded from performance calculations until verified.
We backtest every politician's trade history by simulating their trades chronologically against real historical price data. Each buy adds shares to the portfolio, each sell removes them. Positions are tracked with cost basis and marked to current market prices daily.
The result is a complete portfolio snapshot: estimated value, individual positions, realized and unrealized P&L, sector allocation, and all performance metrics. Portfolios for politicians who have left office are frozen at their departure date using prices from that time.
CAGR represents the compounded annual growth rate of a politician's portfolio over their full trading period. It is derived from the backtested portfolio simulation, not from averaging individual trade returns. A politician who started trading in 2019 and has a portfolio that grew 100% over 5 years has a CAGR of approximately 15%.
Politicians with fewer than 5 enriched trades (trades where we have reliable price data) show N/A for CAGR and other performance metrics.
Alpha measures how much a politician's portfolio outperformed or underperformed the S&P 500 over the same time period. It is calculated as the politician's CAGR minus the S&P 500 CAGR over the exact same date range.
This is why a politician with a higher CAGR can have lower alpha. If someone earned 30% annually during a period when the S&P 500 returned 19%, their alpha is +11%. But a politician who earned 15% when the S&P 500 only returned 8% has +7% alpha — arguably a better stock picker despite the lower raw return.
Many politicians — most notably Nancy Pelosi — trade options extensively. We extract real strike prices and expiration dates from the actual filing documents to accurately model options leverage.
A deep in-the-money LEAPS call controls significantly more stock exposure per dollar invested than an at-the-money option. We compute the actual leverage from the relationship between the stock price and strike price at the time of the trade, rather than using a flat estimate. For trades where strike data is unavailable, we use a conservative default. Strike prices on older filings are adjusted for stock splits.
STOCK Act filings report trade values in ranges (e.g., "$15,001 - $50,000"), not exact amounts. We use the midpoint of each range as the estimated value. Where additional data is available — such as exact share counts from filing descriptions or Annual Financial Disclosures — we use the more precise figures.
We backtest each congressional committee using the same methodology as individual politicians. We take every trade made by committee members during their tenure on that committee, pool them together, and run the same portfolio simulation.
This shows how the committee's collective trading performed — a committee where members consistently buy stocks that outperform will show positive alpha. Only trades made while a member was actively serving on the committee are included.
We compute a range of risk and performance metrics from the daily portfolio simulation:
We cross-reference trading activity with other public records — including legislation, lobbying filings, campaign contributions, and committee assignments — to surface potential patterns and relationships. These are statistical observations intended for research purposes, not allegations of wrongdoing.
Net worth estimates are derived from Annual Financial Disclosure filings, which report assets and liabilities in value ranges. Because of these ranges, net worth figures are estimates with inherent uncertainty.
Chad is our AI-powered research assistant. Chad has access to our full database and can answer questions about politician trades, portfolio performance, committee activity, and cross-reference patterns. Chad's responses are generated by AI and may contain errors or outdated information. Chad does not provide investment advice. See our Disclaimer for more.
If you have questions about our methodology or notice a data issue, please contact us. We take data accuracy seriously and appreciate corrections.