Their trades vs the market

How the portfolios are built

We rebuild a portfolio for each member from the trades they disclosed since January 2024 and compare it with the same dollars put into the S&P 500 on the same days. This measures how the disclosed trades performed. It says nothing about why anyone traded.

Every disclosed purchase and sale since 2024-01-01 of a listed stock, ETF or fund with a ticker. Options count at their underlying stock. Bonds, Treasuries, municipal securities, crypto, private stock, restricted stock awards and exchanges are left out. Trades by a spouse, a dependent child or a joint account are included and flagged. Each trade is sized at the midpoint of its disclosed range ($1,001–$15,000 counts as $8,000.50). An open-ended top range uses its lower bound.

A purchase buys midpoint dollars of the stock at that day's adjusted close (the next trading day's if markets were shut). Sales close lots first-in, first-out per member and ticker: a partial sale closes midpoint dollars' worth, a full sale closes every lot. A sale can only close what was bought in the window. Sale value beyond that came from stock held before 2024, whose cost is unknown, so it is counted as "sold before window" and left out of returns.

Each purchase is mirrored by the same dollars in SPY, an S&P 500 index fund, on the same day, with dividends reinvested. When a stock lot is sold, the SPY lot that mirrors it is sold in the same proportion on the same day. The result is "what if every purchase had bought the S&P 500 instead". Money-weighted return is the dollar gain (realized plus unrealized at the latest close) divided by the average dollars invested on days the portfolio held anything. Annualized IRR uses the same cash flows. The time-weighted index chains daily returns from 100 and stays flat while the portfolio is empty. Excess return is the portfolio's return minus its S&P 500 shadow's, in percentage points; excess gain is the difference in dollars.

Congress, value-weighted, pools every member's lots into one portfolio, so bigger traders weigh more. Congress, equal-weight, counts each ranked member's daily return once, as if every portfolio were rescaled to the same size each day. Party and chamber portfolios are value-weighted. Each series is a daily index starting at 100 on the first trading day of 2024. A member needs at least 5 priced purchases to be ranked. Smaller portfolios are listed with their trade count and are not ranked.

We repeat the whole calculation with every trade executed at the close of the day it was filed: what a member of the public could have done by copying each disclosure as it appeared. The gap between the trade-date and filing-date results is what the reporting delay was worth.

What this can't tell you

• Amounts are ranges, so position sizes are midpoint estimates, and a $1,001–$15,000 trade could be off by a factor of ten.
• Holdings from before 2024 are unknown. Portfolios start empty, and sales of older holdings are left out.
• Members report up to 45 days after a trade, sometimes later, and some trades may never have been reported.
• Tickers that no longer trade (delisted, merged or renamed without a match) can't be priced and drop out. That is survivorship bias, and it most likely flatters returns.
• Options are approximated by their underlying stock. A put counts as owning the stock, and leverage is ignored.
• A lot whose ticker stops trading is held at its last price.
• Fees, taxes and bid-ask spreads are ignored. So is cash: money not in a disclosed position earns nothing.
• Beating or trailing the market says nothing about why anyone traded. It is not evidence of trading on nonpublic information.

Coverage: 12,198 of 12,500 stock and fund trades (97% of their dollar value) could be priced. 1,405 of 1,499 tickers have prices; the 96 without them are mostly delisted or merged companies, funds that aren't exchange-listed, and garbled tickers (largest: SSBK, DAY, K, CTRA, TA, PPBI, WBA, DFS). 147 option trades are counted at their underlying stock. 6,318 priced trades were a spouse's, a dependent's or a joint account's. Methodology version 1.0; prices through October 16, 2026.