Learn · Last updated September 14, 2026

How Congressional Stock-Trade Disclosures Work

Members of Congress must publicly disclose their stock trades, and the reports are free to read. Since the STOCK Act of 2012, every trade over $1,000 by a member, their spouse, or a dependent child must be reported within 45 days. The catch is what the reports do and don't say, and it takes a little practice to read them well.

What gets disclosed

The disclosure document is a Periodic Transaction Report, or PTR. Each row covers one transaction and shows:

• The asset, by name and sometimes ticker: stocks, options, bonds, funds, and bank-issued structured notes all appear.
• The transaction type: purchase, sale, or partial sale.
• An amount band, not an exact amount. Trades are reported in ranges ($1,001 to $15,000, $15,001 to $50,000, and so on upward). A filing can tell you a trade happened and roughly how big it was, never the precise dollar figure.
• Whose account it was: the member's own, a spouse's, or a dependent child's. Family accounts are covered by the same rules, and in practice many filings are mostly or entirely spouse and dependent accounts.
• The dates: when the trade executed and when the member was notified.

The 45-day lag

A PTR must be filed within 30 days of the member learning of the trade, and no later than 45 days after the transaction itself. So, like 13F filings, congressional disclosures run on a delay: what you read today describes trades from days or weeks ago.

And to be plain about it: these disclosures are the law working as designed. A filed PTR is a member complying with the STOCK Act, and reading one is exactly what the law intends the public to do.

The hard part: actually reading them

Knowing the rules is the easy half. Using the disclosures is where it gets genuinely difficult:

• Many filings are paper. Some members file scanned documents, not data. A paper PTR is an image of a form: hundreds of handwritten or typed rows, sometimes smudged, sometimes cut off at the page edge. One recent filing on our roster disclosed 244 trades in a single scanned document. Reading that by hand is an afternoon; doing it every week, for every member you follow, is a job. Most free trackers quietly skip paper filings altogether, which silently drops some of the most active filers.
• The filings are scattered. Each member files separately, on their own schedule, into a government database built for compliance, not reading. There is no feed that tells you someone you follow just disclosed.
• The rows need interpretation. Bands instead of amounts, family accounts, partial sales, options with strikes buried in the asset name: a raw PTR row answers less than it appears to until it's normalized.

What Whale's Nest does about it

Whale's Nest Insiders exists to remove exactly that work: a curated roster of 21 House members, 12,500+ disclosed trades in one place, synced daily from the official records, paper filings included. Every member has a page with their full normalized trade history, for example Ro Khanna, whose 244-trade September filing we analyze here.

Trades older than 45 days are free to browse; the newest disclosures are part of Pro, the same model as our 13F coverage. If you'd rather read filings than hunt for them, that's the pitch in one line.

FAQ

Disclosure requirements per the STOCK Act of 2012 and the U.S. House Financial Disclosure system, where the original filings are public. Methodology at /learn/how-we-source-13f-data. Nothing here is investment advice.