How to See What Stocks Politicians Are Buying (Free)

Congressional Trades Are Public Record

Members of Congress must disclose personal stock trades under the STOCK Act, passed in 2012. The law requires filings within 45 days of a transaction. Every buy and every sell is logged, along with the ticker, the date, and an amount range. The data is not hidden. It is sitting in federal databases, waiting to be pulled.

The catch is that the official interfaces are not built for speed. You can absolutely use them, but most traders end up pairing them with a free aggregator to save time.

The Official Sources

Two separate systems cover the House and Senate.

House disclosures live at disclosures-clerk.house.gov. You can search by member name or date range, then download the PDF for each filing. The PDFs list each transaction individually with the asset name, ticker, transaction type, and the dollar range of the trade.

Senate disclosures are at efdsearch.senate.gov. The search works similarly. Some filings are scanned images rather than machine-readable text, which makes bulk analysis tedious.

Both systems are free and contain the complete legal record. For a one-off lookup on a specific member, they work fine. For monitoring trades across all 535 members, they are slow.

Free Aggregators That Do the Heavy Lifting

Several sites pull the official data and reformat it into searchable, filterable tables. The two most widely used free options are Capitol Trades and Quiver Quant's free tier.

Capitol Trades lets you filter by chamber, party, member, ticker, or date. You can quickly see which stocks are attracting the most recent filings across all of Congress, or drill down to a single senator's full transaction history. No account required for the basic feed.

Quiver Quant's free tier shows a similar aggregated feed and lets you search by ticker to see which members have recently traded a specific stock. The paid tier adds more history and analytics, but the free version covers the core use case.

ChartRead offers a free congressional trade feed covering both House and Senate STOCK Act filings. Each trade in the feed has a one-tap chart read, so you can pull up the pattern, signal, and key price levels on the stock without leaving the screen. Useful when you want to assess whether the chart lines up with the insider activity before spending more time on it.

What the Filings Actually Tell You (and What They Don't)

Filings show a transaction type (purchase or sale), the asset, the approximate date, and a dollar range. The ranges are broad: $1,001 to $15,000, $15,001 to $50,000, $50,001 to $100,000, and so on. You do not get an exact share count or a precise dollar amount.

Transactions can also be reported in bulk on a single amendment filing, which skews the apparent date of activity. Some members file late and pay a nominal fine. The data is real, but it is messy.

How to Actually Use This Information

The traders who get the most out of congressional data treat it as a filter, not a trigger.

• Committee overlap. A member of the Armed Services Committee buying a defense contractor, or someone on the Energy Committee adding a pipeline stock, carries more weight than a random buy. Committee assignments are public and easy to cross-reference.
• Cluster buys. When multiple members from different parties buy the same ticker in a short window, it suggests something worth researching, not an automatic entry signal.
• Confirmation, not causation. Run a chart read on the stock. If the technical picture is broken, the congressional buy alone is not enough. Combine both signals before committing capital.

The data is free, the sources are public, and the workflow takes minutes once you know where to look. Start with the aggregators for a broad feed, verify anything interesting against the official filings, and layer in a chart read before any position.