QuantCapitol. Congressional Trading Intelligence

Updated 2026-11-05 08:16 UTC · Public disclosure record

Methodology

Transparency Interest Score changelog

The Interest Score is a design choice, not a law of nature — so when we change how it's calculated, we say so here, with the date and what changed. The score is never altered silently. Current version: v1.1. See how it's computed on the methodology page, and whether it actually predicts returns on the track record.

v1.1 current 2026-11-03

Added Relative Conviction — a trade's size versus the member's own estimated wealth.

  • A 7th ex-ante factor, Relative Conviction, now contributes to the score (default weight 15, alongside the existing six). It measures how large a trade is as a share of the member's own estimated net worth: a $50k trade is a rounding error for a nine-figure fortune but a 10% bet for a member worth $500k.
  • Net worth is estimated from the annual Financial Disclosures, which report assets and liabilities only in ranges — so it is a range, and the score uses the member's wealth as known AT the time of the trade (never a later filing), keeping the factor fully ex-ante.
  • A data gap never moves a ranking: when we have no wealth estimate for a member, Relative Conviction is left out entirely and the score is exactly the original six-factor score — no neutral fudge, no penalty.
  • When the factor DOES apply, the score is renormalized over the new total weight (100 + 15 = 115), so the final number stays on the same 0–100 scale rather than inflating — the six original factors keep their relative proportions, Relative Conviction takes its 15/115 share, and the result is still percentile-normalized across all disclosures.
v1.0 2026-10-14

First public version of the Interest Score.

  • Launched the ex-ante Interest Score: a 0–100 ranking built only from information knowable at filing time, with no look-ahead to how the stock later moved.
  • Six weighted components: recency (20), size (20), consensus/clustering (18), unusualness for the member (15), the member's trading history (15), and committee jurisdiction over the traded sector (12).
  • Post-trade price movement is measured and shown separately as an outcome — deliberately kept OUT of the ranking score, so the score can be evaluated honestly against returns it never saw.

Why keep this at all? Because a ranking you can trust is one you can audit. If a weight ever shifts, you'll be able to see exactly what moved and when — and we can re-check, in public on the track record, whether the change made the score any better at what it claims to do.

About this data. Sourced from official House Clerk and Senate eFD financial disclosures (Senate via a maintained community mirror — see project documentation). Transaction amounts are reported as ranges, not exact figures. Interest scores, consensus labels, and backtested performance are proprietary analytical calculations based on public data and are not investment advice. Backtested performance is a hypothetical simulation, not actual portfolio performance.