Why Everyone Watches Pelosi's Trades
Nancy Pelosi is the most-followed congressional trader in the country. Interest in her portfolio spiked after several high-profile trades appeared to anticipate major market moves, and it has not slowed down since. Tracking her filings has become a cottage industry of newsletters, bots, and browser extensions.
One clarification up front: the vast majority of trades attributed to "Pelosi" are executed by her husband, Paul Pelosi. As a member of Congress, Nancy Pelosi is required to disclose trades made by her spouse under the STOCK Act. The filer is Nancy, but the trader is typically Paul. The filings say "spouse" when that is the case.
The trades are legal. Disclosure is required. Nothing in the filings implies wrongdoing, and it is worth keeping that context in mind before reading anything into the timing of a transaction.
Where the Filings Live
The primary source is the House Clerk's Financial Disclosure database, available at disclosures.house.gov. Every member of the House of Representatives files Periodic Transaction Reports, or PTRs, there. A PTR must be submitted within 45 days of a trade. That lag is important and covered below.
Searching the House Clerk site is functional but not fast. For a cleaner experience, several free aggregator sites pull and display congressional PTRs automatically. These include Quiver Quantitative, Capitol Trades, and similar services. They present the same underlying data in a more readable format, often with filters by ticker, date, or member.
Understanding the 45-Day Lag
The STOCK Act requires disclosure within 45 days of a transaction. A trade made on day one does not have to be reported until day 45. This means that by the time a PTR appears publicly, the position may already be substantially in profit or loss, and any momentum from the initial entry is long gone.
Following Pelosi filings as a trading signal has a practical limit because of this delay. Traders who try to mirror the trades are acting on information that is at minimum six weeks old. Some PTRs arrive closer to the deadline than others, which adds further uncertainty about the actual entry price.
Don't confuse disclosure timing with trade timing. A filing that appears today likely describes a trade from several weeks ago. The stock price on the day the PTR is published may look very different from the price on the day the trade was made.
What the Filings Actually Show
Each PTR lists the asset, the transaction type (purchase or sale), the date of the transaction, and a dollar range rather than an exact amount. Ranges run from under $1,000 up to over $50 million in broad bands. The Pelosi filings frequently show activity in technology and semiconductor stocks.
Options appear in the filings when call options are purchased or exercised. The filing notes these as "options" in the asset description, and the underlying equity is usually identified. Call options give the buyer the right to purchase shares at a set price before a specific date, so seeing a call option purchase means the trader expected the underlying stock to rise.
Reading a PTR line-by-line is straightforward once you know what you are looking at:
- Asset: the ticker or full name of the stock or option
- Type: "P" for purchase, "S" for sale, and a note if it involves options
- Date: when the trade was executed, not when the report was filed
- Amount: a dollar range, not a precise figure
- Owner: "SP" indicates spouse, meaning Paul Pelosi made the trade
Free Tools That Simplify the Process
Checking the House Clerk site every few days is tedious. Most people use an aggregator or set up an alert. Several free services send email or push notifications whenever a new Pelosi PTR is filed. That way, there is no need to refresh a government database manually.
ChartRead offers a free congressional trade feed that pulls House and Senate STOCK Act filings in one place. Each trade entry links directly to a chart read, so it is easy to see where the stock currently sits relative to its pattern, key prices, and potential signals. That combination of disclosure data and technical context saves a meaningful amount of time compared to pulling up a chart separately for every ticker that appears in a filing.
Cross-check the chart. The filing tells you what was bought or sold. Looking at the chart around that date tells you where the stock was in its trend at the time, and whether the current setup still resembles the one that existed when the trade was made.
The most useful approach is to treat the filings as a research starting point rather than a buy signal. When a name appears in a Pelosi PTR, look at what sector it sits in, whether the trade was a purchase or a sale, whether options were involved, and what the stock has done since the reported transaction date. That combination of context produces a more informed read than acting on the headline alone.
See what Congress is buying, free
ChartRead pulls House and Senate disclosures into one daily feed, with a one-tap chart read on any ticker a member just traded.
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