Python for programmers, prompts for data analysts.
Members of the U.S. Congress have to disclose their stock trades. The law behind it, the STOCK Act, makes those filings public, and a whole cottage industry has grown up around them:
newsletters, trackers, even ETFs built on the idea that if lawmakers are buying something, maybe you should be too.
It's an appealing idea. But a disclosure isn't the same as a live feed of what someone is doing. Before copying anyone's trade, it's worth asking two plain questions of the filing itself:
when did this trade actually happen, and how big was it really?
Want to try this yourself? The EODHD MCP Server is what pulled the data above — connect it to Claude and ask your own questions (affiliate link).
New here? The Setup covers everything you need before your first prompt.
Ask how old the news is
🟧 PROMPT
Use the eodhd MCP to get the most recent
congressional stock trade disclosures, and for
each one show how many days passed between the
trade and the disclosure.
Across the 25 most recent disclosures, the gap between the trade and the public filing ranged from 0 to 17 days. The typical gap was about 11 days: the median was 11, the average 10.7.
None was flagged as late; the STOCK Act allows up to 45 days.The amounts are never exact. Each trade is reported as a range: "$1,001 – $15,000", "$15,001 – $50,000", up to "$500,001 – $1,000,000" in this batch.
So by the time a trade becomes public, the typical one is already a week and a half old — and that's with every filing on time. A "copy Congress" strategy doesn't copy the trade; it copies
a trade that happened eleven days ago, at a price that no longer exists.
And the size is a guess. A trade reported as "$1,001 – $15,000" could be a thousand dollars or fifteen times that. You know the direction. You don't know the conviction.
Ask again, but fairly
🟧 PROMPT
Now take congressional trades from late July, old
enough that every filing deadline has passed, and
show the typical delay and the longest one.
For 100 trades made between July 24 and July 31, the gap to public disclosure averaged 15.1 days, with a median of 15. The shortest was 3 days; the longest, 42. Six of the hundred took
more than a month to appear. None was flagged late.
The first sample said "about eleven days." This one says fifteen. The difference isn't a change in behaviour; it's a change in what we were able to see. Recent trades can only show up with
short delays, because the slow filings haven't arrived yet. Measure only the freshest data and the lag looks shorter than it really is.
Fifteen days is the typical case. The legal limit is 45, and some filers use most of it. A trade disclosed on day 42 describes a market that's six weeks gone.
A word of honesty
A few things deserve naming, and the first is what this article doesn't claim. A disclosure is a legal record of a trade, nothing more. Nothing here suggests that any lawmaker traded on
inside information or broke a rule; every filing in both samples arrived within the 45-day limit. The question was only whether the data is fresh and precise enough to copy, and that's a
question about the filings, not the people.
The sizes are deliberately blurred. The most common bracket in the July sample was "$1,001 – $15,000", a fifteen-fold spread. At the top end, some trades are listed as "Over $1,000,000"
with no upper bound at all. You can tell which way someone traded; you can't tell how much it mattered to them.
Not everything on the list is a stock you can copy. The same filings include municipal bonds, Treasury bills, structured notes, and options with specific strikes and expirations. A
"congressional trades" feed mixes all of them together.
The sample is lumpy. A hundred trades came from just sixteen members, and one single filing accounted for twenty-three rows. One active account can dominate any average built from data
like this.
And the data itself needs the same check Part 33 recommended. One record in the July sample lists a disclosure date four days before its own transaction date — impossible as written, and a
reminder that even official, structured filings pass through human hands before they reach a dataset. Not investment advice.
Final Thoughts
This is the thirty-fourth article in the series Unlock Real-Time Market Intelligence with EODHD and Claude, and a companion to Part 31: there it was corporate insiders and their filing codes, here it's members of Congress
and their filing dates.
Two prompts asked the same question twice, and the second, fairer version gave a different answer.
So here's what they found: a typical congressional trade became public about 15 days after it happened, and some took as long as 42 — all of them on time under the law. The amounts
arrive as ranges up to fifteen times wide. Copying Congress means acting on a trade that's already two weeks old, at a size you can only guess. And even measuring that delay has its own
trap: look only at the freshest filings and the lag shrinks to eleven days, simply because the slow ones haven't arrived yet. The date on the filing is the first thing to check, and not
the last.
If this made you curious, the MCP Server is free to try — The Setup walks you through it.
← Part 33: The Crash That Never Happened: Cleaning Price Data Before You Trust It
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