How STOCK Act disclosure works

Who files

The STOCK Act of 2012 requires members of Congress to report their securities trades in periodic transaction reports. Representatives file with the Clerk of the House and senators with the Secretary of the Senate, whose electronic filing system is called eFD. Paydirt reads both sources and lists every member with a filing in the past 24 months on the Congress index.

The 45-day window

A trade must be reported within 30 days of the member being notified of it, and in any case within 45 days of the trade. The notification date is not on the public report, so Paydirt measures against the 45-day outer bound: a filing marked late was filed more than 45 days after the trade date. Congressional filings carry a date rather than a time, so the gap is counted in calendar days.

Why the amounts are brackets

Members report the size of a trade as a range, not a figure. The ladder runs from $1,001 to $15,000 at the bottom through $15,001 to $50,000, $50,001 to $100,000 and so on up to over $50,000,000. Paydirt always prints the bracket in prose and in a headline. Where it needs one number for arithmetic, a volume tile or a chart, it uses the midpoint of the bracket and labels it derived, with the bracket shown beside it.

How long disclosure takes

Across the congressional filings Paydirt holds, the median gap between a trade and its disclosure is 28 days. That gap is why every return on a Paydirt profile comes in two forms: one from the execution date, which only the member could have earned, and one from the disclosure date, which is the first day anyone reading the filing could have acted. The second is called delay-adjusted, and the returns guide explains it.

Committees and the record

A member's profile names their party, their state and up to two of their full committees, read from the public committee roster, because the committee a member sits on is part of the context in which their trades are read. Paydirt holds no data on bills or votes and draws no line from a committee seat to a trade. Every row links to the original report at the House Clerk or the Senate. The congressional feed is at /feed?src=congress.