The STOCK Act, explained

What the STOCK Act is

The STOCK Act — the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act — is a US federal law signed in April 2012. It does two main things. First, it affirms that members of Congress and federal employees are not exempt from insider-trading law: using material, non-public information obtained through their official position for private profit is illegal. Second, and more consequentially for the public, it requires timely, public disclosure of their securities transactions.

That second part is why a site like this one can exist at all. The trades are not leaked or scraped from private accounts — members are required by law to report them, and the filings are public records.

What members have to disclose, and how fast

Under the Act, members of Congress — and their spouses and dependent children — must publicly report each purchase, sale or exchange of stocks, bonds and similar securities above $1,000. The deadline is within 30 days of being notified of a transaction, and no later than 45 days after the transaction itself.

These reports are called Periodic Transaction Reports (PTRs), filed with the US House Clerk or the Senate. A few things about them matter a great deal when you read one:

• Amounts are ranges, not exact figures — for example "$15,001–$50,000". You never see the precise dollar amount or the number of shares.
• There is a built-in lag. Because disclosure can come up to 45 days after the trade, what you read today may describe a position taken weeks ago.
• It covers the family. A trade marked as a spouse's or dependent child's still appears, because the law reaches household holdings.

Our full database is built directly from these filings, and every trade links back to its original source document so you can verify it yourself.

The part everyone criticizes: enforcement

The STOCK Act's disclosure rules are strong on paper and weak in practice. The standard penalty for filing a report late is a $200 fee — a figure that is often waived and, for a member of Congress, trivial. There is no automatic, meaningful consequence for a late or missing filing, and investigations into suspected misuse of non-public information are rare and hard to prove.

A 2013 amendment also rolled back a requirement to make many federal employees' disclosures available in a bulk, machine-readable, searchable database — a step widely seen as weakening the Act's transparency promise.

The result is a law that produces a genuinely valuable public record, but with soft edges: late filers, range-based amounts, and a disclosure delay. Understanding those limits is the difference between reading the data well and being misled by it.

Why it keeps coming up

Congressional stock trading sits at an obvious tension point: the people writing and overseeing the rules for entire industries can also hold and trade stocks in them. That is why, year after year, there are proposals to go further than the STOCK Act — up to banning individual stock ownership by members of Congress outright. Whatever happens to those proposals, the existing disclosures remain the public's main window into the issue.

That window is exactly what we try to make legible: not to tell you what to buy, but to help you watch what the people in power are doing with their own money — and judge for yourself.