Congressional Trading Performance Leaderboard

The congressional trading leaderboard

The Capitol Trades leaderboard ranks members of the United States Congress by their publicly disclosed stock transactions and estimates the performance of each disclosed portfolio using a time-weighted method. Every entry is built from public congressional financial disclosure filings, so the ranking is a reorganisation of records that are already in the public domain rather than any private information about how a member trades.

How the ranking is built

For each member, disclosed buys and sells are matched to their transaction dates and to public price history, and a time-weighted estimate is produced so that a large one-off position does not distort the picture the way a simple sum would. The leaderboard then orders members by that estimate, and each row links back to the specific disclosure it was computed from. Because the underlying filings are public, any position on the board can be checked against its source document, and the same disclosure often lists the committee assignments and dates that give a trade its context.

Statutory Bracket Valuation & Time-Weighted Methodology

STOCK Act filings report dollar amounts in standardized valuation tiers ($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 over $5,000,000). To avoid arbitrary distortion, Gemral Edge utilizes geometric midpoint values across each bracket. Performance estimates are computed using Time-Weighted Disclosure Returns (TWDR), starting from the legal public filing date rather than execution date, providing a reproducible and verifiable historical audit trail for quantitative analysis.

Committee Oversight & Sectoral Transparency

The leaderboard systematically cross-references lawmaker trading activity with their standing congressional committee assignments—such as the Senate Armed Services Committee, House Committee on Financial Services, House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. This multidimensional mapping surfaces structural intersections between legislative oversight authority and private capital allocation.

Reading it well

The leaderboard is most useful as a starting point for questions rather than as a verdict: which committees the most active traders sit on, whether disclosed activity clusters around particular sectors, how the pace of disclosed trading compares across members of the same committee, and how a member’s disclosed portfolio has moved over successive filings. It is a data view of public disclosures, not a ranking of skill and not a recommendation to follow anyone. Real-time delivery and the full board are available on paid plans.

Top 20 Congressional Stock Traders by Performance

Ranked by estimated 1-year time-weighted portfolio return from verified STOCK Act disclosures.