What is the STOCK Act?
The STOCK Act — the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act — is the 2012 federal law requiring members of Congress and senior staff to publicly disclose their stock trades. It is the reason a site like this can exist: every trade on Hillscore traces back to a disclosure this law requires.
It is also routinely misdescribed. The Act does not ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks, it has been quietly narrowed once already, and its penalty for filing late is smaller than most parking fines. All three things are worth understanding before reading any congressional trading data, including ours.
Why it exists
Legislation to restrict congressional stock trading had been introduced repeatedly since 2006 and had gone nowhere. What changed was publicity: a November 2011 60 Minutes segment, drawing on Peter Schweizer's book Throw Them Out, put the practice in front of a mass audience.
The bill moved with unusual speed after that. The Senate passed it 96–3 on 2 February 2012. The House passed it 417–2 a week later, on 9 February. President Obama signed it on 4 April 2012. Those margins matter for interpreting what followed — a law passed almost unanimously is a law almost nobody wanted to be seen opposing.
What it actually requires
Two distinct things, and the second is the one that produces the data.
It confirmed Congress is not exempt from insider trading law. Trading on material non-public information obtained through your position was already illegal. The Act removed any argument that members were a special case, and made explicit that they owe a duty of trust to Congress and the public.
It created a public disclosure requirement. Any covered transaction over $1,000 — stocks, bonds, commodity futures and other securities — must be reported within 30 days of the member becoming aware of it, and no later than 45 days after the transaction itself. In the House this is a Periodic Transaction Report; the Senate uses an equivalent electronic filing.
Two features of that requirement shape everything downstream:
Amounts are reported as bands, not figures. A filing says
$1,001–$15,000, not $8,432.17. There are wider bands above that, up to
over $50,000,000. No exact sum is ever disclosed, which is why every dollar
figure on this site is an estimate built from band midpoints and labelled
c. — see our data page and
methodology.
Execution prices are never disclosed. A filing gives a date and a band, never a price. Any price you see on a tracker, here included, is a closing price for that day standing in for a number the filing does not contain.
What it does not do
The STOCK Act requires disclosure, not restraint. A member can buy a defence contractor the week before their committee marks up a defence appropriation, as long as they file the paperwork within 45 days. That is not a loophole in the Act; it is the Act working as written.
That distinction is the centre of the current legislative argument. Bills that would actually prohibit members from holding or trading individual stocks are a separate and much harder fight — see the Stop Insider Trading Act explained.
The 2013 rollback
Twelve months after the Act passed, Congress narrowed it.
S.716, introduced by Senator Harry Reid on 11 April 2013, removed the requirement that financial disclosures be published in a searchable, sortable, downloadable online database. It passed the Senate by unanimous consent the same day it was introduced, cleared the House the following day, and was signed on 15 April 2013.
It is worth being precise about the scope, because this is widely overstated. The rollback applied to congressional staff and certain executive branch officers and employees — not to members of Congress themselves. Members' transaction reports remain public, which is why this site has data at all. What was lost was machine-readable, systematic access to the layer beneath them.
The speed and the unanimity are the point. The transparency provisions passed 417–2 in front of the cameras and were narrowed by unanimous consent, in a one-page bill, in under 48 hours.
Enforcement, and the $200 problem
Late filing carries a standard penalty of $200. That figure has not changed since 2012.
For a member disclosing a trade in the $1,001–$15,000 band, a $200 fee is a
meaningful fraction of the position. For one disclosing in a band above
$1,000,000, it is a rounding error. The penalty does not scale with the size of
the trade or the length of the delay, and the House and Senate Ethics
Committees can waive it.
Referrals for actual insider trading are rarer still. The disclosure regime is best understood as a transparency mechanism with an administrative fee attached to non-compliance, rather than an enforcement regime with teeth.
What is exempt
Not everything a member owns shows up.
Widely held investment funds are exempt from transaction reporting where the fund is publicly traded or widely diversified and the member does not control its holdings. Index funds and most mutual funds fall here — which is exactly the arrangement critics propose members should be limited to.
Qualified blind trusts are exempt, on the basis that a member cannot act on information about holdings they cannot see. Genuinely blind trusts are expensive and uncommon.
Positions under $1,000 fall below the reporting threshold entirely.
The practical effect is that disclosure data describes the individual-security trading of members who choose to trade individual securities. It is not a picture of their total wealth, and a member showing no trades may simply hold index funds.
How this shapes what you see here
Everything on Hillscore inherits the Act's limits. Trades appear up to 45 days after they happened, because that is the deadline — why trades appear late. Amounts are bands. Prices are stand-ins. Spouse and dependent-child trades are filed under the member's own name, which is why a member's page can show activity they did not personally direct — what that means.
None of that makes the data useless. It makes it data that has to be read with its shape in mind, which is why we publish the full dataset and the method rather than only the conclusions.