How to Read a Congressional Filing

1. The owner field decides who actually traded

A filing does not only cover the member of Congress. It covers their spouse, their dependent children, and accounts held jointly. Every transaction carries an owner marker saying which.

This is why two rows can look identical — same member, same company, same day, same bracket — and still be two separate transactions. One is the member’s account, the other the spouse’s. They are not duplicates, and dropping one would delete a real trade.

It also changes what a filing means. A trade in a spouse’s managed account says less about the member’s own view than a purchase in their personal account. The document tells you which; most summaries throw that away.

2. The amount is a bracket, not a number

Members do not report what they paid. They tick a band:

$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 — and on up to an open-ended band above $50 million.

Two things follow. A member who bought $16,000 and one who bought $49,000 file the identical bracket; the data cannot tell them apart. And the top band has no ceiling at all, so the largest positions are the least precisely known.

Wherever you see a single dollar figure attached to a congressional trade, someone has picked a point inside a bracket — usually the midpoint. That is an assumption, not a disclosure.

3. Two dates, and the distance between them is the story

Each transaction carries a trade date and a filing date. The STOCK Act allows 30 days from the moment the member learns of the trade, capped at 45 days from the trade itself.

That gap is the one quantity these filings measure precisely. Everything else is a name, a category or a range — the gap is an exact number of days.

It matters because it tells you how old the news is. A trade disclosed after 40 days is public information about a decision made almost six weeks earlier. In a stock that has moved sharply since, the filing describes a different world than the one you are reading it in.

4. A worked example

Take this row. It is made up, but shaped exactly like a real one:

Jane Doe (D) · traded 3 Mar · filed 14 Apr · Purchase · $15,001–50,000 · spouse

Read in order: a Democratic member’s spouse bought somewhere between fifteen and fifty thousand dollars of stock on 3 March, and the public found out on 14 April — 42 days later, just inside the cap.

What you now know: a purchase happened, in that size band, in an account the member is required to report. What you do not know: the share count, the price, whether the member chose it, and whether they knew before the confirmation arrived.

If a second row shows the same company on 3 March at the same bracket but marked self instead of spouse, that is a second real transaction — not the same one counted twice.

5. What a filing cannot tell you

Not the return. Without a share count or a price, no profit can be calculated from a filing alone. Any figure presented as one rests on assumptions the document does not contain.

Not the reason. Most large-cap filings come out of managed accounts, index funds and routine rebalancing rather than a view on the company. A single purchase is weak evidence of anything.

Not what the member knew. A filing records a transaction, not a state of mind. That is a question for an investigation, not a spreadsheet.

And a long gap is not automatically a breach. The clock can start at notification, and a managed account can inform its owner late. What the filings measure is the gap itself.

6. The filings you will never see

Roughly one in ten House disclosures arrives as a scanned sheet of paper rather than an electronic form. There is no machine-readable transaction in it — only an image.

Those are listed separately here, with a link to the source document instead of a guess at the numbers. Running text recognition over a scan would produce figures that look exactly as solid as the real ones and are not. A visible gap is worth more than an invented value.

The same applies to amendments: a member can correct a filing later, and the correction is its own document.

Four mistakes worth avoiding

Treating two rows on one day as a double entry. Check the owner field first — member and spouse file separately.

Reading the bracket midpoint as the amount. It is the middle of a range that can be three times as wide at the top as at the bottom.

Reading the filing date as the trade date. Activity belongs to the month it happened in, not the month the paperwork landed.

Reading one filing as a signal. The pattern across members and months carries more than any single row.