The 60-second version: Every disclosed congressional stock trade is public. The two authoritative sources are House Clerk Financial Disclosures (for House members) and Senate eFD (for senators). Both are free, both are slow, and both publish PDFs you have to read by hand. Aggregators (Capitol Trades, Quiver, Unusual Whales, Autopilot, GovGreed) parse those filings into searchable databases. Pricing ranges from $0 to ~$80/month. The hard ceiling on every tracker is the same: 45-day STOCK Act disclosure window. Paid alerts are 24–48 hours faster than free ones, not 45 days faster. The biggest unlock isn't a faster tracker; it's layering the public committee markup calendar onto the trade feed so you can identify event-driven trades before the disclosure lands.
189,595
Disclosed trades since 2012
45 days
STOCK Act maximum disclosure window
12.5%
Of disclosures filed late
$0–$99
Annual pricing range across major trackers
$55M
AUM in copy-trade products (Autopilot)
$0
What GovGreed costs to run a Conflict Check on your rep
The three official sources (free, slow, authoritative)
Source
What it gives you
Cost
Speed
Official · Library of Congress
Every Periodic Transaction Report (PTR) and Annual Financial Disclosure for every House member since 2012. Search is per-member by name and year. Returns PDFs. The original of every "Pelosi traded" headline.
FREE
45-day lag
Official · Secretary of the Senate
Same data structure for senators. Slightly slower indexing than House Clerk; the search UI is famously ungenerous (returns redacted PDFs for some queries). Workaround: search by senator name + filing year.
FREE
45-day lag
Official · DOJ
Not stock trades, but adjacent. Lists every registered foreign agent (lobbying firm) in the U.S., the foreign principal they represent, and the issue area. Useful when a member trades a defense or telecom stock and you want to know who's lobbying their committee.
FREE
Real-time
Official · Federal Election Commission
Every campaign contribution to every federal candidate. Cross-reference against trade history to identify donor-vote alignment. Limit: 60 API calls per hour without an API key.
FREE
2-week lag
Official · Senate
Lobbying Disclosure Act filings. Quarterly reports of who lobbied which committee on which bill, including dollar amounts. The other half of the donor-vote-trade triangle.
FREE
Quarterly
Official · Library of Congress
The unsung hero. Public schedule of every congressional committee markup, hearing, and floor vote. This is what you should be watching alongside the trade feed. If you knew Khanna sits on Armed Services and HASC marks up the FY26 NDAA on a specific Tuesday, you don't need to wait 45 days for the PTR.
FREE
Real-time
Official · Office of Government Ethics
Executive-branch equivalent of the STOCK Act PTR. Cabinet secretaries, agency heads, and Senate-confirmed officials file here. Hegseth's 278-T is the primary document underneath the BlackRock/IDEF story.
FREE
30-day lag
The five major commercial trackers
Tracker
What it does
Pricing
Edge
2iQ Research · Frankfurt
Free aggregator of all disclosed congressional trades. Clean UI, decent search. No alerts, no API on the free tier. Adequate for casual reading.
FREE
No alerts
Quiver / NANC ETF parent
Aggregator + backtests + per-politician portfolio replication. Free tier shows trades; paid tier ($10/mo) adds backtests and Discord alerts. Backed the +177% Pelosi backtest most outlets cite.
$10/mo
Discord alerts
Unusual Whales
Options-flow platform that includes congressional trades as one of many data feeds. Heavy options bias. $48-$80/mo depending on tier. Built for active retail options traders.
$48-80/mo
SMS+API
Autopilot · iOS app
Mirrors Pelosi (and a few other politicians' portfolios) directly into the user's brokerage account on a 1-business-day delay. $99/year, ~$55M AUM as of early 2026. Solves "what stocks should I buy" with the simplest possible answer: "what they bought."
$99/yr
Auto-mirror
Subversive Politicians Fund · NYSE Arca
Actively-managed ETF that holds the disclosed Democratic-Congress portfolio. Sister fund KRUZ holds the Republican portfolio. Standard ETF expense ratio (~0.75%); buy in any brokerage. The hands-off way to get the cohort exposure.
~0.75% ER
Quarterly
GovGreed
Free aggregator + 7-layer scoring + ZIP lookup
Free tier: conflict-check tool, every politician's full record, every executive cabinet profile, every active herd signal, the API at /api. Paid tier ($19+/mo): live signal feed (819 active predictions), daily intelligence brief, alert webhooks, full historical export.
FREE+ tier
Bill-calendar
The honest summary: for casual reading, all five aggregators show roughly the same data with different UI. Differentiation kicks in on three vectors:
- Alert speed. Paid alerts (Quiver, Unusual Whales, GovGreed) are 24–48 hours faster than refreshing Capitol Trades by hand.
- Bill / committee context. Only GovGreed and (partially) Quiver attempt to cross-reference each trade against the bill calendar and committee jurisdiction. This is the layer that matters most for prediction.
- Copy-trade automation. Only Autopilot and the NANC/KRUZ ETFs offer truly hands-off mirroring.
The 45-day delay reframe
This is the part of the conversation that nobody outside the data-science community gets right. Every tracker article ends with the same complaint: the 45-day disclosure delay makes copy-trading useless. That framing is half right.
It is true that by the time a trade is disclosed, the price has typically moved 5–25%. The "follow the trade" thesis is therefore mathematically broken for most large-cap moves.
It is not true that the 45-day delay makes the data useless. The reframe:
The default narrative
The reframe
The 45-day STOCK Act disclosure delay makes copy-trading useless. The price has already moved by the time you can mirror it.
The disclosure is the late confirmation of a thesis you could have built 30 days earlier from the public committee markup calendar. Bills move slowly. Markup schedules are public. The trade is the receipt, not the signal.
The "follow Pelosi" trade is the gold standard.
Pelosi is retiring. Khanna, Gottheimer, McCaul, Hickenlooper, and Foxx all have stronger 3-year backtests in their committee sectors — and they're not retiring. Stop following one celebrity. Start following the cohort.
The STOCK Act would work if it were enforced.
The STOCK Act was designed to be unenforceable — Congress wrote it, fined itself $200, and gutted the public-database provision in 2013. The fix is not enforcement. The fix is visibility.
The bill-calendar workflow nobody else publishes
This is the workflow that GovGreed's prediction engine implements, written out so you can do it by hand if you want.
- Identify a politician with consistent committee-aligned trading. Use our /conflict-check page or /learn/pelosi-stock-trades for the cohort list. Khanna for tech, McCaul for foreign-policy / defense, Gottheimer for finance, Foxx for healthcare, Hickenlooper for telecom.
- Pull their committee assignments from the official congressional record (also visible on each politician's page on GovGreed).
- Pull the public markup calendar from Congress.gov for the relevant committee.
- Identify which bills the committee will mark up in the next 30–60 days, and which sectors / tickers those bills affect (our /legislation page maps this with `bill_impacts` data).
- Watch the committee meeting — they're public. Bills that pass markup unanimously move quickly; bills that get modified or delayed move slowly. The market reaction is usually within a week.
- When the disclosure lands 30–45 days later, compare to your hypothesis. If the politician bought the same sector you predicted, your model is calibrated. If not, recalibrate.
This workflow is not a substitute for fundamentals. It is an information overlay. The cleanest version of it sits in our /investable live signal feed.
FAQ
What is the best way to track congressional stock trades?
The best free way is to combine three things: the official House Clerk and Senate eFD portals for primary disclosures, a free aggregator like GovGreed's Find Your Rep widget for politician-by-politician views, and the Congress.gov committee calendar to layer the bill schedule onto the trade history. Paid tools (Capitol Trades, Quiver, Unusual Whales, Autopilot) add alert speed and copy-trade automation but cannot defeat the 45-day STOCK Act disclosure delay.
Can I copy congressional stock trades automatically?
Yes. Autopilot ($99/year, ~$55M AUM as of early 2026) auto-mirrors disclosed Pelosi trades into a user's brokerage account on a 1-business-day delay after the PTR is filed. The NANC ETF (Subversive Politicians Fund) and its Republican counterpart KRUZ hold the disclosed congressional portfolios as actively-managed funds you can buy in any brokerage. Both approaches inherit the 45-day disclosure lag and lose 5–25% of the underlying move on average.
How accurate are congressional trade trackers?
Tracker accuracy is a function of (a) the official disclosures themselves, which are 100% authoritative but lag the trade by up to 45 days, and (b) the tracker's data ingestion. GovGreed flags 12.5% of disclosed trades (23,426 of 189,595) as filed past the 45-day STOCK Act deadline. Some trades are never disclosed at all — trackers can only surface what gets filed. Late-filing rates vary widely by member: Suozzi 86.4%, Tuberville 22.0%, McCaul 20.7%.
Can I get real-time alerts on Congress trades?
"Real-time" is structurally impossible because of the 45-day STOCK Act window. The fastest you can get an alert is within 24 hours of the PTR being filed — which is still 1–45 days after the actual trade. Quiver Quantitative and Unusual Whales offer alerts at this speed. GovGreed adds a complementary alert: when a politician's committee schedules a markup of a bill in a sector that politician has historically traded, we flag the upcoming meeting before any trade is filed. That's the closest thing to a true forward-looking alert.
Is the 45-day disclosure delay the same for senators and representatives?
Yes. Both chambers operate under the same STOCK Act 45-day window. In practice, House filings tend to be marginally faster to publish than Senate filings; the Senate eFD search UI is also slower and more restrictive.
What about cabinet members and the executive branch?
Cabinet members file OGE Form 278e (annual) and Form 278-T (periodic transaction, within 30 days). The Office of Government Ethics is the official source. Most aggregators don't cover the executive branch as well as they cover Congress. Read GovGreed's cabinet trading guide → The Open Cabinet tracker (open-cabinet.org) is the most comprehensive cabinet-specific tool — 34 officials, ~3,200 transactions, ~$2.7B AUM as of April 2026.