About The Potomac Ledger

The Potomac Ledger tracks the stocks that Congress and senior executive-branch officials buy and sell — drawn entirely from public disclosures, explained in plain English, and reported the same way for everyone regardless of party.

What we do

Every week we read the new financial-disclosure filings from the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, and the executive branch, translate them out of legal and financial jargon, group them by official, and flag the trades where a company's sector overlaps the official's committee or agency. It goes out as two free editions: Congress on Mondays, the executive branch on Tuesdays. A members' edition adds every disclosed trade in full, downloadable data, and mid-week alerts.

Nonpartisan by design

Our selection rules are mechanical and applied identically to every official. We do not weight coverage by party, and we do not editorialize about motives. A trade by a Democrat and a trade by a Republican that meet the same criteria get the same treatment. The point is the disclosure and the overlap — not the politics.

Where the data comes from

Everything we publish is public record:

• U.S. House Clerk — Periodic Transaction Reports filed under the STOCK Act.
• U.S. Senate — the Senate's electronic financial-disclosure system.
• U.S. Office of Government Ethics — OGE Form 278-T periodic transaction reports for the executive branch.

We link to the original filing on every entry so any reader can verify our work against the source.

Our editorial standards

• Public records only. Nothing is leaked, scraped from a brokerage, or inferred from market activity.
• Disclosed, not executed. We always describe a trade as disclosed in a given week, never executed that week — filings lag the trade by 30 to 45 days.
• Ranges, not precision. Amounts are reported in legal bands, so every figure we show is a disclosed range.
• Flags are heuristics. A conflict flag marks a sector/committee or sector/agency overlap worth noticing — not a finding of wrongdoing.
• We correct the record. When a filing is amended or we get something wrong, we fix it.
• Not investment advice. This is reporting on public disclosures, not guidance to buy or sell anything.

For the full mechanics — how a single disclosure is read, what "late" means, and how we choose what's notable — see our methodology.

Why this matters

Officials who write and enforce the rules also trade in the markets those rules affect. The law says they must tell the public what they trade. We make that public record easy to read — so accountability doesn't depend on knowing how to parse a 30-page PDF.

Who publishes it

The Potomac Ledger is an independent publication of Seven Roots. It is funded by readers — optional memberships and voluntary support — which keeps the weekly editions free and the coverage beholden to no party, campaign, or advertiser.