How to read a congressional trade disclosure

What a PTR is

A Periodic Transaction Report (PTR) is the filing a member of Congress submits to report a stock trade, as required by the STOCK Act. Each line is one transaction. Once you know what the fields mean — and what they deliberately omit — you can read one in seconds.

The fields, one by one

• Filer — the member of Congress, and their chamber (House or Senate).
• Owner — who holds the asset. You will see codes like SP (spouse), DC (dependent child), JT (joint), or it may simply be the member themselves. A spouse's trade is still disclosed, because the law reaches the household.
• Asset — the security traded, usually a company name and, where it resolves, a stock ticker.
• Transaction type — a purchase (buy), a sale (sell), a partial sale, or an exchange.
• Transaction date — when the trade happened.
• Notification / filing date — when it was reported. The gap between this and the transaction date is the disclosure lag.
• Amount — a range, such as $1,001–$15,000 or $100,001–$250,000. Never an exact figure, and never a share count.

What a PTR does not tell you

Reading a PTR well is partly about respecting its limits:

• No exact size. A "$250,001–$500,000" purchase could be anywhere in that band. You can rank trades by size bracket, but you can't size them precisely.
• No price or shares. The filing is about the fact of the trade, not its execution.
• No "why". A PTR never states a motive. Any read of intent is inference, which is exactly why context matters.

What actually makes a trade worth a second look

Most disclosures are routine. The ones that deserve scrutiny tend to share a few traits — and these are precisely the signals we fold into each trade's Interest Score:

• Size. A six-figure bracket stands out from a $1,001–$15,000 routine buy.
• Oversight overlap. A member trading in an industry their committee regulates is the classic conflict-of-interest pattern — see our Conflicts view.
• Clustering. Several members — especially across both parties — buying the same stock in a short window is a consensus worth noticing.
• A long disclosure lag. A trade reported close to the 45-day limit is, at minimum, a transparency question.

One important caution we build into the data: we also show how the stock moved during the non-public window between the trade and its disclosure, but that price move is shown for context only. It is deliberately not part of the Interest Score — scoring a trade as "interesting" because we already know it worked out would be hindsight bias. The score reflects only what was knowable at filing time.

Put together, those fields turn a dry filing into something you can actually judge. Browse them yourself in the full database, where every row carries exactly these fields.