Congressional PTR backfill — 12mo trailing (2025-05 to 2026-05)
Initial backfill for the congressional-trades data source extension of /investing:smart-money-watch. STOCK Act periodic transaction reports (PTRs) are publicly disclosed 30-45 days after each transaction; Quiver Quant aggregates House + Senate filings and ships the structured rows directly inside each politician page as a JS tradeData variable. Scraping it is read-only and requires no auth — see scraper script for details.
Coverage
| Member | Party | State | Chamber | Trades in 12mo | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ro Khanna | D | CA | House | 5,083 | High disclosure count, mostly small managed-account trades; signal density per row is low |
| Michael T. McCaul | R | TX | House | 1,429 | Spouse's family wealth trust; large $ volume, sector breadth |
| John Boozman | R | AR | Senate | 206 | Steady managed-account flow |
| Markwayne Mullin | R | OK | Senate | 195 | Active trader, concentrated in large-caps |
| Josh Gottheimer | D | NJ | House | 125 | NJ Dem, financials-heavy |
| Nancy Pelosi | D | CA | House | 21 | Founder-named primary; HIGH signal density per trade (each is large + directional) |
| Tommy Tuberville | R | AL | Senate | 12 | Active well-known trader; lower volume than reputation suggests for this window |
| Daniel S. Goldman | D | NY | House | 0 | Lifetime total 1,294 but none in trailing 12mo window |
| Lisa Mcclain | R | MI | House | 0 | Only 3 lifetime; possible bioguide mismatch — re-verify |
| Gilbert Cisneros | D | CA | House | 0 | Empty in window |
| Cleo Fields | D | LA | House | 0 | 1,542 lifetime but none in 12mo window |
Total rows captured: 7,071 (CSV at 2026-05-18-backfill.csv)
Signal density caveat
Raw row count is misleading. Pelosi at 21 trades has higher signal density than Khanna at 5,083 because Pelosi's trades:
- Are large dollar-value (frequently $500k - $25M brackets)
- Reflect intentional directional bets (often near earnings or policy windows)
- Are disclosed under her name (vs Khanna's are spouse's managed account flowing through a wealth-management firm — smaller, broader, less intentional)
For signal extraction: filter to substantive notional brackets ($15k+) and weight Pelosi / Tuberville (concentrated directional traders) far above Khanna / McCaul (managed-account passive flow). 1,857 of the 7,071 rows meet the substantive bracket filter.
Top signals visible in this backfill
1. Pelosi's Jan 2026 mega-rotation
On 2026-01-23 (filed) Pelosi (or Paul) executed a coordinated multi-position move covering trades from 2026-01-16:
- Sale: AAPL ($5M-$25M, two tranches) — substantial reduction
- Sale: DIS ($1M-$5M), GOOGL ($1M-$5M), AMZN ($1M-$5M), NVDA ($1M-$5M), PYPL ($250-500k)
- Purchase: AB ($1M-$5M, AllianceBernstein), AMZN ($500k-$1M then a smaller $100-250k), GOOGL ($500k-$1M), NVDA ($250-500k), VST ($100-250k), TEM ($50-100k)
- Exchange: VSNT — corporate action
Read: trimming hyperscaler exposure into early 2026 and rotating into financials (AB) + energy/utilities (VST = Vistra power) + AI-pure-play (TEM = Tempus AI). Half of this looks like rebalance, half looks like a thesis pivot.
2. Multi-member purchase darlings
These tickers were bought by 3+ tracked members in the trailing 12 months (substantive notional only):
| Ticker | # Members | Members |
|---|---|---|
| GOOGL | 5 | Boozman, Mullin, McCaul, Pelosi, Khanna |
| MSFT | 4 (substantive) | Gottheimer, Mullin, McCaul, Khanna |
| AMZN | 4 (substantive) | Mullin, Pelosi, Boozman, Khanna |
| UNH | 3 | Mullin, McCaul, Khanna |
| NOW | 3 | Mullin, McCaul, Khanna |
| AAPL | 3 | Mullin, Pelosi, Khanna |
| AVGO | 3 | McCaul, Pelosi, Khanna |
GOOGL stands out: bought across both parties, both chambers, by 5 distinct members. Same tier of bipartisan accumulation that smart-money 13F managers (Appaloosa + Duquesne) showed in Q4 2025. Cross-source corroboration is real.
3. Sector breakdown of substantive recent purchases (last 6 months, >$15k)
| Sector | Count |
|---|---|
| Financials | 73 |
| Information Technology | 63 |
| Industrials | 47 |
| Health Care | 41 |
| Consumer Discretionary | 32 |
| Consumer Staples | 15 |
| Communication Services | 11 |
| Materials | 10 |
| Energy | 5 |
Financials + IT lead — same posture as the 13F universe. Energy at 5 is notable given the power-thesis structural bull case; Congress is NOT yet stacking energy/utility names (Pelosi's lone VST buy is an outlier here, not a trend).
Blockers / known gaps
- 403 rate-limiting from Quiver — page hits get throttled at the Cloudflare edge after ~6-8 quick requests. Mitigated by 5-second delay between requests + exponential backoff retry on 403. Two members (Mcclain, Cisneros) returned empty even after retry — most likely bioguide ID mismatch; verify on next pass.
- Bioguide-ID validation needed — current list was assembled by inspecting Quiver autosuggest blocks; should be re-validated against bioguide.congress.gov.
- Owner field not granular — Quiver's embedded
tradeDatadoes not separately disclose self/spouse/dependent ownership. Acceptable trade-off vs scraping clerk PDFs directly. Description text sometimes hints (e.g., "PURCHASED 25,000 SHARES" without owner attribution). - Quiver's "Quiver Score" / excess-return column captured in source but not used downstream. Could enrich brief output later by surfacing only-trades-with-positive-excess-return.
Next runs
Cron monthly on the 15th. Each run pulls trailing 60 days (covers two PTR filing windows) and diffs vs the prior monthly snapshot to surface new disclosures.
Re-run command:
~/.claude/scripts/dram-spot-venv/bin/python ~/.claude/scripts/congress-trades-scraper.py backfill --months 2 --out ~/rdco-vault/01-projects/investing/anchors/smart-money/congress/YYYY-MM-DD-monthly.csv
Related
- [[01-projects/investing/anchors/smart-money/2026-05-17-aggregate-2yr-backfill-summary.md]] — companion 13F aggregate; cross-reference candidate
- [[01-projects/investing/anchors/smart-money/congress/2026-05-18-cross-source-overlap.md]] — TIER-1 multi-source signal extraction from this backfill
- [[.claude/skills/investing-smart-money-watch/SKILL.md]] — skill that owns this data source