Do congressional spouses have to disclose stock trades?
Yes — and they are filed under the member's own name, not separately. That one rule explains why a trade attributed to a politician here, or on any congressional tracker, may not have been made by that politician. The STOCK Act requires members to disclose covered transactions made by a spouse or dependent child, filed under the member's own name rather than separately.
This is one of the most consequential features of the data and one of the least discussed. It means a headline reading "Senator X made 40 trades last quarter" may be describing someone else's brokerage account entirely.
Why the law works this way
If a member has access to material non-public information through office, that access does not evaporate because the account belongs to their spouse. Exempting household trades would create a complete and obvious workaround: any member wishing to act on what they learned in a briefing would simply have someone else place the order.
So the obligation follows the household rather than the individual. That is the right design for closing a loophole. It is a poor design for attribution, and those two purposes are in permanent tension.
What the filings do and do not tell you
A Periodic Transaction Report does have a field indicating whether the filer, a spouse, a dependent child or a joint account made the transaction.
In practice that owner information is inconsistently completed, and it does not survive reliably into the downstream data feeds trackers are built on — ours included. The result is that a member's page here shows household activity presented under one name.
We do not claim to distinguish the two, because the data we hold does not support the distinction. Any site that presents a confident split between member and spouse trades is telling you more than the filings do.
What that means when reading a politician's page
Three things follow, and they change how much weight a single page can carry.
A high trade count may not reflect an active member. It may reflect an active spouse, or a managed account being rebalanced on a schedule. Some of the most prolific "traders" in any congressional dataset are households where somebody other than the member is placing the orders.
A Composite score is a household figure. Our score is the plain average return of every disclosed buy. Where those buys came from a spouse, the score measures the household's decisions. Calling it a measure of the member's skill overstates it.
The conflict-of-interest question is unaffected. This is the part worth holding onto. Whether the member or their spouse bought the defence stock, the member still votes on defence appropriations while the household holds it. For the purpose the disclosure regime exists to serve, the distinction the data cannot make is also the one that matters least.
Does it affect the accuracy of the numbers?
Not the accuracy of any individual trade. The date, the amount band and the closing price on that date are correct regardless of who in the household decided.
What it affects is the claims those numbers support. "This politician is a skilled stock picker" is a stronger statement than the data can carry. "This politician's household has disclosed trades that performed this way" is the precise version, and it is the framing we try to hold to — though headline space and ordinary English make it easy to slip, here as anywhere else.
Our committee signals deserve the same care. A Notable flag records that a household traded in a sector the member's committee oversees. That is the pattern worth surfacing, and it is why the flag is framed as a screening signal rather than an allegation. Which member of the household placed the order is not something any tracker can tell you.
Would a trading ban change this?
Yes — and it is the clearest illustration of the difference between disclosing a conflict and removing one.
The Stop Insider Trading Act extends its purchase prohibition to spouses and dependent children, for exactly the reason the disclosure rule covers them: a restriction stopping at the member would be trivially avoidable.
Under a disclosure regime the household boundary is an attribution problem that no amount of better data engineering can solve, because the information was never captured. Under a prohibition it stops being a problem at all. That is one of the stronger practical arguments made for the bill, and it is rarely the one you hear.