How we track the stock trades of every U.S. politician (STOCK Act data, 2026)

Mees Wijnants — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 11:01:47 +0000

By Mees Wijnants, founder and CEO of Wolf of Washington

Every member of the U.S. Congress has to report their stock trades. The data is public, but it is spread across thousands of PDFs on two different government websites. At Wolf of Washington we turn those filings into one clean, searchable list. This post explains how that works and what the data shows.

The legal basis: the STOCK Act

Since the STOCK Act of 2012, members of the House and Senate must report any stock trade above $1,000 within 45 days. In the House this report is called a Periodic Transaction Report (PTR). Senators file theirs in the Senate eFD system.

The two official sources:

House: Clerk of the House, Financial Disclosure Reports
Senate: Senate Electronic Financial Disclosures

The pipeline, step by step

Collect. We pick up new filings from both chambers as they appear. The House publishes a yearly index file with every document ID; each PTR links to its own PDF.
Read. Many PTRs are clean electronic PDFs. Some are scanned paper forms, which need extra care. For each line the useful fields are owner (self, spouse, joint, dependent child), asset, type (purchase, sale, exchange), transaction date, notification date and amount range.
Clean up. Asset names in filings are written in many ways. They need to be matched to the right company, and stocks need to be kept apart from options.
Verify. Every trade on a politician page links back to the original filing, so anyone can check it.
Review. Experienced traders on our team look at every new filing. Of the 16,781 congressional trades reported in the last 1.5 years, we shared 221 with members since March 2025. Less than 1.5% makes the cut.

Our database now holds more than 102,000 trades from more than 350 members of Congress since 2012.

What the data shows

Most people assume Nancy Pelosi is the most active trader in Congress. By number of trades she is not. Among the politicians on our congress trading page, the most active in the last 12 months (as of 30 October 2026):

Politician	Trades, last 12 months
Ro Khanna	3,676
Kevin Hern	196
Markwayne Mullin	81
Tom Kean Jr	66
Cleo Fields	61

Pelosi stands out for size, not volume: large option positions in big tech, mostly made by her husband Paul Pelosi. She also has the highest estimated net worth of the politicians on our page, followed by Kevin Hern and Peter Meijer.

Lessons for anyone building on this data

Amounts are ranges. A filing says "$1,000,001 to $5,000,000", never an exact number. Treat every dollar figure as an estimate.
Delays are real. Up to 45 days can pass between trade and report. The data tells you what happened, not what will happen.
Owner matters. "SP" means spouse. A large share of headline trades are not made by the politician personally.
Volume is not signal. Thousands of small managed account trades say less than one large, well timed position.

Try it yourself

If you want to start with one politician, I open sourced a small tool: Pelosi Trade Finder (MIT, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23914626). It lists every official PTR of Nancy Pelosi, or any House member, with a direct link to the original PDF.

For the full picture across 500+ politicians, see wolfofwashington.io/congresstrading.

Not investment advice.

About the author. Mees Wijnants is the founder and CEO of Wolf of Washington, which tracks the public stock trades of 500+ U.S. politicians for 5,000+ members. He studied Economics and Politics at Leiden University. More at meeswijnants.github.io.

I built a free open source tool to track Nancy Pelosi's official stock trade reports

Mees Wijnants — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 13:58:30 +0000

I wanted a simple way to see every official stock trade report filed by Nancy Pelosi, straight from the source. The data is public, but it is spread over yearly index files and PDFs that are hard to search. So I wrote a small, free and open source Python script that does the searching for you.

Repo: github.com/MeesWijnants/pelosi-trade-finder
Latest filings (auto updated weekly): FILINGS.md

Why this data exists

Under the STOCK Act (2012), members of Congress must report stock trades above $1,000 within 45 days. In the House these reports are called Periodic Transaction Reports (PTRs) and they are published by the House Clerk.

The Clerk offers one ZIP file per year with an XML index of every filing. Each row has the member's name, the filing type, the date and a document ID. PTRs have filing type P.

How the tool works

Download https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/financial-pdfs/{year}FD.zip
Parse the XML and keep rows where FilingType == "P" and the name matches
Build the link to the original PDF: .../ptr-pdfs/{year}/{doc_id}.pdf

No API key, no dependencies, Python 3.8 or newer. Standard library only (urllib, zipfile, xml.etree).

for f in filings:
    if f.get("FilingType") != "P":   # P = Periodic Transaction Report
        continue
    if f.get("Last", "").lower() != last.lower():
        continue
    pdf_url = PTR_PDF_URL.format(year=f["Year"], doc_id=f["DocID"])

Usage

git clone https://github.com/MeesWijnants/pelosi-trade-finder
cd pelosi-trade-finder

# Nancy Pelosi, last 5 years
python pelosi_finder.py

# Any other House member
python pelosi_finder.py --last Crenshaw --first Dan

# Export
python pelosi_finder.py --markdown FILINGS.md --json filings.json

A GitHub Actions workflow runs the script every Monday and commits the fresh FILINGS.md, so the list in the repo stays current without anyone touching it.

What it does not do

It does not read the PDFs or extract individual trades. Every result links to the original PDF so you can check it yourself.
House only. Senate reports live at efdsearch.senate.gov.
It is not investment advice. Filings can be up to 45 days late, so they show what happened, not what will happen.

Why I built it

I'm the founder of Wolf of Washington, an app that tracks the public stock trades of 500+ U.S. politicians and explains them in plain language. The app does the heavy lifting (parsing PDFs, alerts, history). This script is the opposite: the smallest possible tool that shows where the data really comes from. I think that transparency matters more than any feature.

The code is MIT licensed. Issues and pull requests are welcome.

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Wolf of Washington. This post and the tool are for education only and are not investment advice. More about me: wolfofwashington.nl/over-ons

DEV Community: Mees Wijnants