Insider trading
This section covers two kinds of insider: corporate insiders trading their own company's stock, and members of Congress trading stocks while they hold office. Both must disclose their trades. The disclosures show when each trade was made.
Company insiders
Officers and directors trading their own company's stock, scored on how well each open-market trade was timed against the market.
Members of Congress
Lawmakers' disclosed stock trades, with amounts as the ranges the STOCK Act requires. Senate 2012–2020 (Senate Stock Watcher) plus House and Senate 2023–2026 (Capitol Trades).
Co-trading signals
A Member of Congress and a corporate insider trading the same company the same way within 30 days, with the chance baseline for each match.
Crypto Influence Watch
Crypto-industry lobbying, direct giving and independent expenditures, lined up against abnormal token moves around the policy decisions that benefit them.
Corporate insider trading, explained
A company's own officers, directors, and anyone holding more than ten percent of its stock must report every trade they make in that stock to the Securities and Exchange Commission. They report on a public filing called Form 4, within two business days. The filings are legal and routine. They record the timing of each trade.
We take every open-market purchase and sale these insiders disclosed across the companies we track. Then we measure how the stock moved over the month after each trade, compared with the market as a whole. A sale that lands just before an abnormal drop, or a purchase just before an abnormal rise, is a trade timed to the insider's benefit.
How to read the corporate score
Each insider carries a score from 0 to 100, set by their single best-timed trade. Higher means better timed in the insider's favor.
The score is built from four parts. The largest is how unusual the move was for that particular stock, measured in standard deviations of its own history. A 12 percent move in a steady name like Lockheed Martin is a far rarer event than a 27 percent move in a volatile one like Palantir. The score treats it that way, so a number means the same thing from one company to the next. The other three parts are whether the direction favored the insider, the dollar size of the trade, and how senior the insider was. A chief executive or chief financial officer is weighted above a director, and a director above a passive large holder.
Open any row to see the role, the dollar value, the exact one-month window, the market-adjusted move, and the standardized z-score behind it.
A score is a triage signal that tells you where to look, not an accusation. A well-timed trade can be skill, luck, or a sale scheduled months in advance under a 10b5-1 plan. The SEC feed does not yet let us flag those plans. Grants, option exercises, and tax-withholding sales are excluded, because they are not decisions to bet on the stock.
Congressional stock trading, explained
Members of Congress and senior staff must disclose their securities trades under the 2012 STOCK Act. They file periodic transaction reports with the House and the Senate. The concern differs from the corporate side. A lawmaker trades while holding a seat that can write laws about, fund, investigate, or oversee the companies they trade. The law permits those trades and requires only that they be disclosed. Trading around knowledge gained in office is the conflict. This dataset cannot yet say whether a given trade touches a member's own committee, because committee assignments are not loaded.
What the congressional numbers mean
Two things make this data read differently. First, the law requires amounts to be disclosed only as ranges, such as 1,001 to 15,000 dollars, never as exact figures. So every trade shows a low and a high rather than a single number. Second, disclosure lags. A member can report a trade weeks after making it, and the gap between the transaction date and the disclosure date is shown as the disclosure delay.
Each row shows the member, the company and its ticker, whether the trade was a purchase, a sale or an exchange, the disclosed dollar range, and the transaction date. Coverage comes from two sources. Senate Stock Watcher holds Senate periodic transaction reports from 2012 to 2020, which carry no disclosure dates. Capitol Trades holds a smaller set of House and Senate trades from 2023 to 2026, which do. No House trades before 2023 are loaded, so the disclosure-delay column is filled only for the Capitol Trades rows.
Where the two connect
A corporate insider and a member of Congress who trade the same company the same way within a month of each other may warrant a closer look. The two may have been acting on the same information. But such matches are also common by chance. Insiders at the large contractors in this dataset sell so often that a random day frequently falls inside such a window. The co-trading page reports that chance baseline next to every match.
Corporate trades come from Form 4 filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Congressional trades come from the periodic transaction reports filed with the House Clerk and the Senate Office of Public Records. Prices are end-of-day market data, and every score is measured against the market over the same window.