GovGreed Methodology: The 7-Layer Congressional Trading Signal Engine

Q: How does GovGreed score congressional trades?

GovGreed uses a 7-layer weighted scoring model applied to every STOCK Act trade in the database. The layers are: politician quality (20%), herd behavior (20%), bill correlation (16%), technical context (12%), sector momentum (12%), contribution pattern (10%), and lobbying alignment (10%). Each layer contributes a 0-100 sub-score; the weighted sum is the master score, also on a 0-100 scale. Trades where 3 or more layers fire simultaneously receive a convergence multiplier (1.3x for 3 signals, 1.5x for 4, 2.0x for 5+), up to a hard cap of 100. Trades are then classified into tiers: S (75+), A+ (60+), A (50+), B (40+), C (30+), D (20+), F (<20). Tier backtests are small-sample and raw (not excess vs the S&P 500), so we don't publish a tier win rate. The current active model is version v3.

Q: What does each layer measure?

Politician quality is a per-trader 0–100 score built from historical buy and sell win-rates, call and put accuracy, and committee alignment — bucketed into tiers S through F. Herd behavior measures whether 3 or more politicians independently bought the same ticker within a rolling window (31 active herd clusters). Bill correlation scores the timing distance between a trade and related bill activity. Technical context pulls RSI, moving averages, and volume surge. Sector momentum scores congressional net flow into each sector. Contribution pattern checks whether the politician received campaign money from the same sector they are trading (565 active patterns). Lobbying alignment checks whether active lobbying matches the trade (2,101 active patterns).

Q: Does GovGreed publish a win rate for its signal tiers?

No. We backtest each tier by comparing a scored trade's price 30 days after the trade date with its price at the trade, with signals deduplicated quarterly so windows do not overlap. Tier backtests are small-sample and raw (not excess vs the S&P 500), so we don't publish a tier win rate. Signals that do not produce enough price action within 90 days automatically expire.

Q: Why do only 61 politicians have signal scores when 354 actively trade?

Because the scoring engine filters to trades with a midpoint value of $50,000 or more. This is intentional: small trades ($1K–$15K range) are not statistically meaningful insider signals and would dilute the model. Politicians who trade exclusively in the small-amount tier — such as Rep. John Boozman (167 trades, mostly under $15K) — are therefore excluded from the scored set even though every one of their raw trades is still in our database. The filter produces 61 politicians with active scores and 2,790 scored signals, which is the statistically significant set. The full 354-member trader universe is still exposed in unfiltered trade data, leaderboard stats, and every per-politician spotlight page.

Q: What are the 4 prediction engines?

GovGreed runs 4 forward-looking prediction engines daily. Engine 1 — Committee Markup — starts from the committee markup calendar, maps committee members to the bill's affected sector, and predicts which politicians are likely to trade before the markup. Engine 2 — Pattern — detects recurring dollar-cost averaging behavior using 3 purchases over 120 days as a threshold, flagging politicians who are due for their next buy. Engine 3 — Signal Bridge — converts high-score signals directly into forward predictions. Engine 4 — Bill Correlation — uses historical bill–trade pairings to identify politicians who consistently trade around specific bills. Combined output: 6,817 active predictions as of September 25, 2026.

Q: Where does the data come from?

GovGreed aggregates from 8 public federal data sources. STOCK Act trade disclosures come from the FMP Ultimate feed (primary) and QuiverQuant (reconciliation), both sourced from the House and Senate clerks. Bill and vote records come from Congress.gov. Campaign contributions come from FEC. Lobbying filings come from the Senate LDA database. Corporate insider trades come from SEC EDGAR Form 4. Federal contract awards come from USASpending.gov. Market prices come from FMP and Yahoo Finance. No private or subscription-only data is used. Every fact surfaced on GovGreed is traceable to a public federal filing or commercial market data feed with citation attribution.

Q: How often is the model retrained?

The signal engine's layer weights are versioned and re-fit periodically; new weight sets are activated explicitly, never automatically. Between weight updates, the daily pipeline recomputes master scores for new trades and refreshes herd, contribution, and lobbying detections. The Bill Investability ML model (separate from the signal engine) was trained on 42,199 bills from the 117th and 118th Congresses and validated on 119th Congress data. Model versions are tracked internally, and deprecated versions are retained for audit purposes.

GovGreed

The 7 Layers

Every STOCK Act trade with a midpoint value of $50,000 or more is passed through seven scoring layers. Each layer produces a 0–100 sub-score. The master score is a weighted sum, capped at 100 before convergence multipliers apply.

Layer	What It Measures	Weight	Underlying Signal
Politician Quality	Historical win-rate, committee alignment, trading style	20%	Per-trader quality score
Herd Behavior	3+ politicians buying same ticker in rolling window	20%	Active herd clusters
Bill Correlation	Trade timing vs. related bill activity	16%	Bill–trade pairings
Technical Context	RSI, SMA, volume surge, trend direction	12%	Daily technical indicators
Sector Momentum	Congressional net flow into sector, heat tier	12%	Sector momentum readings
Contribution Pattern	Campaign money from trade's sector	10%	FEC contribution matches
Lobbying Alignment	Active lobbying matching trade's sector	10%	Senate LDA filings

Convergence Multipliers

When 3 or more layers fire simultaneously for a single trade, the base master score is multiplied:

3 signals firing: 1.3× multiplier
4 signals firing: 1.5× multiplier
5 or more signals firing: 2.0× multiplier (the "Perfect Storm" case)

The final master score is hard-capped at 100 regardless of multiplier. Trades with 5+ active layers are rare — GovGreed has identified roughly 30 Perfect Storm events in the full 99,546-trade dataset (deduplicated, as of 2026-09-25).

Tier Thresholds

Each scored signal is classified into one of 7 tiers based on its master score:

75+

Highest conviction

A+

60–74

High conviction

50–59

Strong

40–49

Moderate

30–39

Borderline

20–29

Weak

< 20

Noise floor

The 4 Prediction Engines

In addition to scoring trades after they're disclosed, GovGreed runs 4 forward-looking prediction engines daily. They generate the forward predictions that feed the live predictions feed on the dashboard. As of September 25, 2026 the combined output is 6,817 active predictions.

Committee Markup Engine — starts from the committee markup calendar, maps committee members to the bill's affected sector, and predicts which politicians are likely to trade before the markup.
Pattern Engine — detects recurring dollar-cost averaging behavior using 3 purchases over 120 days as a threshold. Flags politicians due for their next buy within a 21-day window.
Signal Bridge Engine — converts high-score signals (score ≥ 20, lookback 365 days) directly into forward predictions.
Bill Correlation Engine — uses historical bill–trade pairings to identify politicians who consistently trade around specific bills reaching markup.

All four engines run on a single daily refresh job at 11:45 PM UTC. Predictions expire after 30 days or when superseded by a newer prediction for the same politician, sector, and source.

Why Only 61 Politicians Get Signal Scores

The scoring engine deliberately filters to trades with a midpoint value of $50,000 or more. This excludes politicians who trade exclusively in the $1K–$15K range because those trades are not statistically meaningful as insider signals and would dilute the model. The filter produces 61 politicians with active scores and 2,790 scored signals, which is the set we backtest against. The full 354-member trader universe is still exposed in unfiltered trade data, leaderboard stats, and every politician spotlight.

Backtest Results

Results come from our backtest dataset, which deduplicates signals quarterly to prevent overlapping windows. Each scored trade is compared with the stock’s price 30 days after the trade date, and results are grouped by tier.

Tier backtests are small-sample and raw (not excess vs the S&P 500), so we don't publish a tier win rate.

Data Sources

GovGreed aggregates from 8 public federal data sources:

STOCK Act disclosures — FMP Ultimate feed (primary) + QuiverQuant (reconciliation), sourced from House and Senate clerks
Bill and vote records — Congress.gov (1,000 req/hr)
Campaign contributions — FEC (60 req/hr)
Lobbying filings — Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) database
Corporate insider trades — SEC EDGAR Form 4 (10 req/sec)
Federal contract awards — USASpending.gov
Market prices — FMP + Yahoo Finance
Stock news — Brave Search API (sentiment-scored)

No private or subscription-only data is used. Every fact on GovGreed is traceable to a public federal filing or commercial market data feed. See the llms-full.txt for the full machine-readable data dictionary.

Model Retraining Cadence

Model weights are versioned as integers. The retraining job runs gradient descent over held-out quarters to maximize predictive accuracy, producing a new version. New versions are activated explicitly — nothing rolls out automatically. Deprecated versions are retained for audit.

The Bill Investability ML model (separate from the signal engine) was trained on 42,199 bills from the 117th and 118th Congresses and validated on 119th Congress data. Each bill receives a 0–100 investability score.

Known Limitations

GovGreed publishes these limitations openly:

Disclosure gap ceiling: Trades are only visible after STOCK Act filing. Average 50-day (median 28-day) disclosure gap caps how timely any signal can be.
Small-amount exclusion: Politicians who trade exclusively below $50K are not scored. Their trades appear in data but not in signal tiers.
Bill text gaps: Some Congress.gov fields (CRS summary, committee code) are missing for early-stage bills. Bill intelligence is reconstructed from our bill-to-ticker impact map and the committee markup calendar instead.
Not predictive of legality: A high master score flags statistical convergence, not illegal insider trading. Legal determination requires prosecution, not correlation.
Backtest != forward performance: Tier backtests are small-sample, raw, and in-sample. Forward returns may differ. This is not financial advice.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does GovGreed score congressional trades? ▾

GovGreed uses a 7-layer weighted scoring model applied to every STOCK Act trade in the database. The layers are: politician quality (20%), herd behavior (20%), bill correlation (16%), technical context (12%), sector momentum (12%), contribution pattern (10%), and lobbying alignment (10%). Each layer contributes a 0–100 sub-score; the weighted sum is the master score, also on a 0–100 scale. Trades where 3 or more layers fire simultaneously receive a convergence multiplier (1.3x for 3 signals, 1.5x for 4, 2.0x for 5+), up to a hard cap of 100. Trades are then classified into tiers: S (75+), A+ (60+), A (50+), B (40+), C (30+), D (20+), F (<20). Tier backtests are small-sample and raw (not excess vs the S&P 500), so we don’t publish a tier win rate. The current active model is version v3.

What does each layer measure? ▾

Politician quality is a per-trader 0–100 score built from historical buy and sell win-rates, call and put accuracy, and committee alignment — bucketed into tiers S through F. Herd behavior measures whether 3 or more politicians independently bought the same ticker within a rolling window (31 active herd clusters). Bill correlation scores the timing distance between a trade and related bill activity. Technical context pulls RSI, moving averages, and volume surge from our daily technical indicators. Sector momentum uses our sector heat-tier classifications. Contribution pattern checks whether the politician received campaign money from the same sector they're trading (565 active patterns). Lobbying alignment checks whether active lobbying matches the trade (2,101 active patterns).

Does GovGreed publish a win rate for its signal tiers? ▾

No. We backtest each tier by comparing a scored trade’s price 30 days after the trade date with its price at the trade, with signals deduplicated quarterly so windows do not overlap. Tier backtests are small-sample and raw (not excess vs the S&P 500), so we don’t publish a tier win rate. Signals that do not produce enough price action within 90 days automatically expire.

Why do only 61 politicians have signal scores when 354 actively trade? ▾

Because the scoring engine filters to trades with a midpoint value of $50,000 or more. This is intentional: small trades ($1K–$15K range) are not statistically meaningful insider signals and would dilute the model. Politicians who trade exclusively in the small-amount tier — such as Rep. John Boozman (167 trades, mostly under $15K) — are therefore excluded from the scored set even though every one of their raw trades is still in our database. The filter produces 61 politicians with active scores and 2,790 scored signals, which is the statistically significant set. The full 354-member trader universe is still exposed in unfiltered trade data, leaderboard stats, and every per-politician spotlight page.

What are the 4 prediction engines? ▾

GovGreed runs 4 forward-looking prediction engines daily. Engine 1 — Committee Markup — starts from the committee markup calendar, maps committee members to the bill's affected sector, and predicts which politicians are likely to trade before the markup. Engine 2 — Pattern — detects recurring dollar-cost averaging behavior using 3 purchases over 120 days as a threshold, flagging politicians who are due for their next buy. Engine 3 — Signal Bridge — converts high-score signals directly into forward predictions. Engine 4 — Bill Correlation — uses historical bill–trade pairings to identify politicians who consistently trade around specific bills. Combined output: 6,817 active predictions as of September 25, 2026.

Where does the data come from? ▾

GovGreed aggregates from 8 public federal data sources. STOCK Act trade disclosures come from the FMP Ultimate feed (primary) and QuiverQuant (reconciliation), both sourced from the House and Senate clerks. Bill and vote records come from Congress.gov. Campaign contributions come from FEC. Lobbying filings come from the Senate LDA database. Corporate insider trades come from SEC EDGAR Form 4. Federal contract awards come from USASpending.gov. Market prices come from FMP and Yahoo Finance. No private or subscription-only data is used. Every fact surfaced on GovGreed is traceable to a public federal filing or commercial market data feed with citation attribution.

How often is the model retrained? ▾

The signal engine's layer weights are versioned and re-fit periodically; new weight sets are activated explicitly, never automatically. Between weight updates, the daily pipeline recomputes master scores for new trades and refreshes herd, contribution, and lobbying detections. The Bill Investability ML model (separate from the signal engine) was trained on 42,199 bills from the 117th and 118th Congresses and validated on 119th Congress data. Model versions are tracked internally, and deprecated versions are retained for audit purposes.

How GovGreed Scores Congressional Trades