How We Read a Disclosure

Every figure we publish comes from a public filing that an official was legally required to make. This page explains exactly how we turn those filings into the weekly editions — what we use, what we add, and the limits we never paper over.

The data we use

We work only from official, public records. Nothing here is leaked, scraped from a brokerage, or inferred from market activity.

• Congress — Periodic Transaction Reports (PTRs) filed under the STOCK Act of 2012 with the U.S. House Clerk and the Secretary of the Senate. Any covered transaction over $1,000 must be reported within 30 to 45 days.
• Executive branch — periodic transaction reports on OGE Form 278-T, filed by Cabinet secretaries, agency heads, and Senate-confirmed appointees and published by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, under the same 30-to-45-day rule.

Trades held by a spouse or dependent children are part of the same filings and are included as the filing reports them. Each entry links back to the original document so you can read the source yourself.

Disclosure date is not the trade date

This is the single most common misreading, so we are strict about it. Filings lag the actual trade by 30 to 45 days, which means a disclosure that appears this week usually reflects a trade made weeks earlier. We always say a trade was disclosed in a given week — never executed that week. Where both dates exist in the filing, we keep them distinct.

Why every figure is a range

The law requires officials to report transaction values in broad bands — for example, "$1,001–$15,000" or "$500,001–$1,000,000" — not exact amounts. So every dollar figure you see is a disclosed range, not a precise number. When a single large figure gets quoted elsewhere, it is almost always the top of a range.

What a "conflict" flag means

A conflict flag is a heuristic, not an allegation. We raise it when the company traded falls in a sector that overlaps the official's role — a lawmaker trading a company in their committee's jurisdiction, or an agency official trading a company their agency oversees. It is a "potential overlap worth a second look," and nothing more.

Screening compares each trade only to the sectors a member's current committees oversee, so an official with no current committee seat — a departed member or chamber leadership — has nothing to screen against. For them we show "—" rather than a count: the absence of flags is "not screened," not an all-clear.

What "late" means

The STOCK Act sets a filing deadline of 30 to 45 days after a trade. When a disclosure lands after that window, we mark it late and show the number of days. Late filings are common and a late mark is a factual statement about timing — it says the paperwork arrived past the deadline, not that anything improper happened.

How we decide what's "notable"

The free editions and the homepage tracker surface a notable subset: sizeable transactions, flagged sector/committee overlaps, and late filings, shown one row per official so a single prolific filer can't crowd out everyone else. Members see every disclosed trade in full. The selection is mechanical and applied the same way to every official, regardless of party.

The limits of this data

• Amounts are ranges, not exact values.
• The reporting lag means you are always looking at the recent past, not real time.
• A disclosure shows a transaction, not the official's reasoning, intent, or full portfolio.
• Filings can contain errors or ambiguous entries; we clean obvious issues but the source is what it is.
• An overlap flag is a heuristic, and none of this is investment advice.

Corrections

If a filing is amended or we get something wrong, we fix it. The underlying records are public, and we link to them on every entry so any reader can check our work against the source.