How to track stock trades by Congress and the president

I have always been a little nosy about other people's portfolios. Not to copy them. A list of what someone actually bought just tells you more than anything they say on television. The good news is that a lot of it is public. Members of Congress, the president, big fund managers, and corporate insiders all have to file their trades. You just have to know where to look, and how to read it.

The STOCK Act: why politicians show their trades

In 2012, Congress passed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, better known as the STOCK Act. It says members of Congress and many senior federal officials have to publicly disclose their securities trades. The threshold is any transaction over $1,000. The deadline is 45 days. The idea was simple: make it harder to quietly trade on information the public does not have yet.

Each individual trade gets reported on a Periodic Transaction Report, or PTR. Members also file a longer financial disclosure once a year that lists what they hold.

The forms, decoded

A few acronyms cover almost everything you will run into.

• PTR (Periodic Transaction Report): a member of Congress's individual trades, filed within 45 days, in dollar ranges.
• Annual financial disclosure: a yearly snapshot of a member's holdings and income.
• OGE Form 278-T and 278e: the executive branch versions. The 278-T reports individual transactions; the 278e is the annual report. The president files these too.
• 13F: any investment manager running over $100 million files one every quarter, within 45 days of the quarter's end. This is how you see famous fund portfolios.
• Form 4: a corporate insider, meaning an officer, director, or a 10% owner, files this within two business days of a trade. It is the fastest and most specific of the bunch.

Where to actually find them

All of these are free.

• Congress: the House posts at disclosures-clerk.house.gov, and the Senate at efdsearch.senate.gov.
• The president and senior officials: the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, at oge.gov.
• Funds and insiders: the SEC's EDGAR database holds every 13F and Form 4. Our own filings tool pulls straight from it, and our hedge fund tracker follows the big 13F filers for you.

How to read one without fooling yourself

This is the part most people skip, and it is where the mistakes happen.

First, the numbers are ranges, not exact figures. A filing might say a trade was worth $1,001 to $15,000. That is as precise as it gets.

Second, there is a lag. A PTR can land up to 45 days after the trade. A 13F can be 45 days behind the quarter. By the time you read it, the position may already be gone.

Third, a famous name on a filing does not always mean that person picked the stock. Plenty of large portfolios are run by outside managers or held in blind trusts. The president's disclosed trades, for example, are reported as managed by third-party firms, not directed personally.

Fourth, disclosure is not endorsement, and a famous buy is not a signal. The tidy story, where someone well known buys and the stock takes off, usually falls apart on a closer look. You are reading history, not a forecast.

Why it is worth the trouble

Because filings are the rare place where you see what someone did with their money, not what they said they would do. Read enough of them and patterns start to show. You can see a member of Congress who trades constantly, or a fund quietly building a position months before anyone notices. Just keep the limits in mind, and you will get more out of these than most people do. If you want to see the same idea applied to one real case, our look at Nancy Pelosi's disclosures walks through one filing start to finish.

Nothing here is investment advice. These are public records, and reading them is a research habit, not a strategy.