What Is a Periodic Transaction Report (PTR)?

Every time a member of Congress trades a stock, the disclosure shows up as a Periodic Transaction Report, or PTR. If you have never seen one, it looks intimidating: a government PDF full of codes and date columns. It is actually simple once you know what each field means.

What a PTR is

A PTR is a short filing that reports one or more securities transactions by a member of Congress, their spouse, or a dependent child. It is required under the STOCK Act for any trade over $1,000 and must be filed within 45 days. One PTR can list a single trade or a whole page of them.

Reading a PTR line by line

The Columns That Matter

OwnerWho made the trade. SP means spouse, DC means dependent child, JT means joint, and a blank usually means the member.

AssetThe company name and ticker, like Apple Inc. (AAPL), followed by an asset-type code.

TypeP for purchase, S for sale, sometimes "S (partial)." This is the buy or sell.

DateThe transaction date, then the notification date the member was told.

AmountA range, not an exact figure, such as $1,001 - $15,000.

The asset-type codes

Right after the ticker you will see a bracketed code. The two that matter most for trading:

[ST] a regular stock position.
[OP] an option. This is the one people miss. When a member buys call options, the filing tags it [OP], and the description often spells out the strike and expiration. Options are a leveraged, higher-conviction bet, so an [OP] line tends to be more interesting than a plain stock buy.

Options hide in plain sight. A lot of tools only parse the [ST] stock lines and silently drop the [OP] options. The biggest, most-watched congressional bets are frequently options, so a feed that ignores them misses the headline trades.

The amount ranges

PTRs never show an exact dollar amount. They use fixed bands so you know the rough size:

$1,001 - $15,000
$15,001 - $50,000
$50,001 - $100,000
$100,001 - $250,000
$250,001 - $500,000
$500,001 - $1,000,000
$1,000,001 - $5,000,000, and higher for the largest trades

A trade in the top bands is worth more attention than one at the bottom, simply because the member committed real money to it.

What to take from it

Read the owner, the buy or sell, whether it is stock or options, and the size. A large [OP] call purchase by a member who sits on a committee tied to that industry is the kind of line that makes news. A small [ST] buy in a broad index fund is noise. The PTR gives you everything you need to tell the two apart.

See what Congress is buying, free

ChartRead pulls House and Senate disclosures into one clean feed, updated daily, with a one-tap scan on any ticker a member just traded.

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