Congressional committee stock trades
Committee stock trades are the sharpest question in congressional trading. A member of the House Intelligence Committee buying a defence contractor, or a Financial Services member buying a bank, is not doing anything unlawful. It is also the single clearest structural conflict in congressional stock trading, and almost nobody publishes it as data.
This is what Hillscore's committee mapping exists to measure. Every disclosed buy is checked against the committees the member actually sits on, and flagged where the stock's sector falls under that committee's jurisdiction.
The committees with the most overlap
Counting flagged trades — those where a tracked member bought into a sector their own committee oversees:
| Committee | Flagged trades |
|---|---|
| House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence | 436 |
| House Committee on Financial Services | 399 |
| House Committee on Education and Workforce | 305 |
| House Committee on Energy and Commerce | 144 |
| Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation | 104 |
Two cautions before reading anything into that ordering.
It reflects who trades, not who is compromised. A committee with one prolific trader will outrank a committee of twelve members who rarely trade. The count measures disclosure volume passing through a jurisdiction, not propensity.
Jurisdictions differ enormously in breadth. Intelligence maps to defence and technology; Financial Services to banks, insurance and real estate. A broad remit catches more trades mechanically. Every committee page shows which sectors it is mapped to.
How a trade gets flagged
Three tags, in descending order of specificity:
Cluster — the strongest. At least one other tracked member of the same committee traded the same stock within 30 days. Colleagues moving on one name in one month is a narrower pattern than any individual trade.
Notable — the stock's sector falls under a committee the member sits on.
Aligned (Mega-cap) — the overlap is real, but the stock is something almost anyone might own regardless of their seat. Owning Apple says little about committee access, so these are deliberately discounted.
Everything else is Unaligned, and forms the comparison baseline.
What happened to those trades
This is the part that makes the exercise worth doing rather than merely suggestive. If committee access produced an information edge, flagged trades should outperform once each stock's own sector is accounted for.
They underperform:
| Signal | Trades | vs. sector benchmark (3M) |
|---|---|---|
| Cluster | 129 | −1.56% |
| Notable | 693 | −2.82% |
| Aligned (Mega-cap) | 476 | −0.09% |
| Unaligned | 3,376 | +0.21% |
Trades in a member's own committee sectors trailed their benchmark by 2.82%. Trades outside them beat theirs by 0.21%. That is a spread of 3.02 percentage points, pointing the opposite way to the theory. The full analysis.
Why we still publish the flags
Because performance is not the only reason to care.
A flag records a structural conflict, not a prediction. A member who sits on a committee overseeing an industry, and holds stock in that industry, has a conflict whether the position made money or lost it. Disclosure records the conflict; it does not resolve it. That remains true when the trade performs badly, which most of these did.
The performance test answers a narrower question — is there evidence of an information advantage? — and the answer in this dataset is no. Those are different questions and it is worth keeping them apart, particularly since the finding is frequently misread as exonerating.
Which committees are excluded, and why
Not every committee is mapped. Three are deliberately left out:
Budget allocates across all twenty budget functions and never reaches specific programmes or companies. A flag would fire on nearly every trade its members make and carry no information. That is a limit of this signal, not a claim its members lack access.
Rules and Ethics have no sector jurisdiction at all — they concern procedure and member conduct.
Appropriations is handled at subcommittee level rather than as a whole. Its subcommittees write the actual spending bills for named sectors — Defense, Energy and Water, Homeland Security — which makes them narrower signals than most full committees, not broader ones. Treating the parent committee as "too broad" while ignoring its subcommittees measured the wrong level.
The limits worth knowing
Only current membership is checked. A trade from 2023 is tested against the seats a member holds today. Assignments are fairly sticky for incumbents, but this is not exact.
The sector-to-committee mapping is our judgement, not an official classification. It is published in full so it can be disagreed with — see the mapping.
Coverage is partial. The most active disclosed traders, not all 535 members.
Browse it yourself: all committees, or every flagged trade with the sector and committee behind each one.