Congressional options trades

Every options trade disclosed by a tracked member in the last five years. None of them is scored, and this page explains why.

72 option trades by 6 of the 64 members we track. They are a small part of congressional trading overall — under 1% of the disclosures we hold — but they are concentrated: Josh Gottheimer and Nancy Pelosi account for 89% of them, and for Nancy Pelosi options are 29% of everything disclosed in the window.

Who trades them

Contract term is the average time from purchase to expiry, and Strike vs price is where the strike sat against the stock's price on the day the contract was bought: negative means the strike was below the market, so the contract already had value the moment it was bought. Stock vs strike is the other end of the same contract, and divides the other way round: where the stock stood against that strike when the contract ended. The two answer different questions and will not reconcile — Bloom Energy's $100 strike was 40% under the stock when bought and the stock is 189% over it now, both of the same contract. None of the three is a return, which is why none is coloured like one. Both cover the contracts bought, so they rest on fewer rows than the trade count beside them — that column counts contracts sold as well, and a sale has no purchase price to measure a strike against. The column says how many. Both are available only where a filing gives the contract terms, which at present means one member, Nancy Pelosi.

Neither is a return. A call struck far below the market costs more in premium for precisely that reason, so a deep strike describes how a position was built, not what it made. Nancy Pelosi's average strike sits 44% below the price on the day of purchase and the contracts run about 12 months: that is a leveraged long position in the stock, not a bet on a big move. Her options trades, scored goes through every contract.

Strikes are compared on the same basis as prices. A filing gives the strike of the day it was written, and a stock that has split since does not: the price series is restated and the document is not. Comparing the two as they stand turns a Broadcom call struck at $800 before a ten-for-one into a contract 402% out of the money, when it was in fact struck 50% below the market. Every strike here is restated for splits after the purchase date before it is compared with anything; the member's own page shows both figures.

Exercised contracts are a separate matter. Where one is exercised the shares it delivers are real, and they are scored as a holding from the market price on the day they arrive — marked "Exercised call" wherever the trade appears. The contract still carries no return. What is excluded here is the option; what is measured there is the stock it turned into.

Why these carry no return

• The premium is never disclosed. Filings give a dollar band for the transaction, not what was paid for the contract, so there is no cost basis to measure a return from.
• Our data source drops the terms. The filings themselves do state whether a trade was a call or a put, at what strike and expiring when. The feed we buy flattens all of that to "options on X", so we cannot say which way a member was positioned.
• Most filers do not describe them anyway. Across a sample of 27 members' filings, 11% of transactions carried any description at all. Even parsing the original documents would leave most option trades without terms.
• The outcome often goes unreported. A sale is disclosed. An option expiring worthless generally is not, so the record can show a purchase and never show how it ended.

What we can show

The stock's own move after the trade date, over the same windows the rest of the site uses. Read it as the direction, not the outcome: a call bought the same day would have gained where the stock rose, a put would have lost, and the contract's own return could be a multiple of either — or nothing at all, if it expired out of the money.

Buy and Sell mean the contract was acquired or disposed of — not which way the bet pointed. A member can buy a call (betting the stock rises) or buy a put (betting it falls), and the filings we receive do not say which. So a purchase here is not a bullish signal, and 1W, 1M and 3M are the underlying stock's move over that period after the trade date, never the option's return. "Rolled" marks a same-day buy and sell in the same stock: one decision to close a position and open another, not two separate bets.

"Managed account" marks a filing that names an outside manager, meaning the member did not choose the trade. Only some filings say so, so its absence does not mean the opposite.

One member's page shows more than this one can. The filings themselves do state whether a trade was a call or a put, at what strike and expiring when — our supplier drops that, but the House Clerk publishes it. Most members never fill the field in: across a sample of 27 members, 11% of transactions carried any description at all. Nancy Pelosi's filings describe every one, so her page publishes the contract terms read from the original documents. That is a difference in what was disclosed, not in how we treat anyone.

Options are excluded from every figure elsewhere on Hillscore: the rankings, the sector comparisons, the Notable and Cluster tags and the downloadable data. See the methodology for everything else that is left out and why.

Data last updated 08 November 2026.