Guide
How our Interest Score works
Thousands of trades are disclosed every month. The Interest Score is how we surface the handful worth a closer look — and it's built to measure notability, not profit.
The problem it solves
Most congressional stock trades are routine. A member buying a small amount of a broad index fund is not news. The hard part isn't finding trades — the full record has tens of thousands — it's finding the few that genuinely warrant attention. The Interest Score is a single 0–100 number that does exactly that: the higher the score, the more a trade stands out as notable.
What goes into it
The score is a transparent, weighted blend of signals that were knowable at the time the trade was filed. In plain terms, a trade scores higher when it is:
- Large. A six-figure amount bracket carries more weight than a routine small buy.
- Unusual for that member — a departure from their normal trading pattern, not business as usual.
- Part of a cluster — several members, especially across both parties, moving on the same stock in a short window (see our guide to clusters).
- In a sector the member oversees — the classic conflict-of-interest pattern, where a committee assignment overlaps the industry traded (see committees & sectors).
The exact weights and formula are laid out on the Methodology page — we don't hide them. Every top-ranked trade on the site also carries a plain-language "score card" that breaks down why it ranked, dimension by dimension.
The one thing it deliberately leaves out
The score never uses what the stock did after the trade. Folding in the subsequent price move would be hindsight bias — rating a trade as "interesting" partly because we already know it worked out. Keeping the score strictly ex-ante is what lets us test it honestly, and it's why you can trust that the ranking reflects genuine notability rather than a rigged, backward-looking backtest.
What a high score does — and doesn't — mean
A high Interest Score means a trade is noteworthy: big, unusual, clustered, or inside a member's area of oversight. It does not mean the trade was or will be profitable. We've checked that distinction on our own data — see "Does it work?" — and we're candid that the score does not reliably predict returns. It's a scrutiny tool, not an investment signal.
Frequently asked
Is a high Interest Score a buy signal?
No. The score measures how notable a trade is — size, rarity, clustering and oversight overlap — using only information available at filing time. On our own data it does not reliably predict returns, so it is a tool for scrutiny and accountability, not for investing.
Does the score use the stock's price after the trade?
No. It is strictly ex-ante: it only uses what was knowable when the trade was filed. We show the later price move separately, for context, but it is never part of the score — including it would be hindsight bias.