The screenshot is the weakest part of every "Congress just bought this stock" post. Behind it sits a public record that is slower, vaguer and messier than the screenshot lets on, and as of late October 2026, half of that record became much harder to collect. We build the Congress Trades feature in MarketCast, so we read these filings every week. Here is where the data really comes from, what it can and cannot tell you, and why the Senate side just went dark for automated trackers, ours included.

Where does Congress stock trading data come from?

Every congressional trade tracker, from the big websites to the accounts that post a new screenshot every morning, is reading the same two government sources. Under the 2012 STOCK Act, members of Congress file a periodic transaction report (a PTR) when they, or in many cases their spouse or dependent child, buy or sell a stock, bond or other covered asset worth more than $1,000.

The House publishes its filings through the Clerk of the House at disclosures-clerk.house.gov. The Clerk puts out a yearly index that lists each filing, and each filing itself is a PDF. Most are typed into an electronic form and come out as clean, readable documents. Some are scanned paper: a photo of a printed form, sometimes filled in by hand, sometimes slightly crooked. A computer cannot read a scanned page the way it reads text, so every tracker either types those up, runs character recognition on them and hopes, or quietly skips them.

The Senate publishes through the Senate's electronic financial disclosure site, efdsearch.senate.gov, run by the Senate Office of Public Records. Before you can search anything, you have to accept a usage agreement. That agreement points to 5 U.S.C. 13107(c), which restricts using these reports for commercial purposes, with an exception for news and communications media passing them along to the public. Keep that agreement in mind; it comes up again below.

That is the whole supply chain. There is no secret feed, no official API, and no tracker with better access than you have from a web browser.

What a congressional trade disclosure can tell you

A filing tells you who filed, the asset, whether it was a purchase, a sale or an exchange, the date of the trade, the date it was filed, and whose account it was in. That is genuinely useful public information. It is also much less than the screenshots imply.

Amounts are brackets, not numbers. Filers do not report a dollar figure. They check a range: $1,001 to $15,000, $15,001 to $50,000, $50,001 to $100,000, $100,001 to $250,000 and up from there. A "$1,001 to $15,000 purchase of NVDA" could be $1,100 or $14,900. Any tracker that shows you a total dollar volume picked a point inside each bracket and added them up. Different trackers pick different points.

The 45-day rule is a ceiling, and it gets broken. A trade is due no later than 45 days after it happens (30 days after the filer learns of it, if that comes first). In practice, a lot of filings arrive months later, and some arrive years later. The penalty for a late report is a $200 fee. By the time a trade shows up in anyone's feed, the market has usually moved on, which is the single biggest reason a disclosure is a history lesson and not a tip.

"Congress bought" often means "a spouse's account bought." Each line has an owner field: the member, a spouse, a joint account or a dependent child. Many members also have accounts run by a financial adviser who makes the trades without asking first. A screenshot almost never shows the owner field.

A filing never says why. There is no reason field. A sale could be a tax move, a rebalance, a down payment or a hunch. Reading intent into a PTR is guessing, and we say so right on our Congress pages.

Why do Congress trading trackers disagree?

Put three trackers side by side and you will often get three different answers for the same member and the same month. None of them has to be lying. They just made different choices:

• What counts as one trade. A single filing can list the same stock five times for five lots bought on one day. Some trackers count five trades, some count one.
• Which dollar figure they use. The bottom of the bracket, the middle, or the top. Over a busy filer's year, that choice alone can change a "total traded" number several times over.
• Amended filings. Members file corrections. Count the original and the amendment and you have double counted.
• Matching names to tickers. Filings describe assets in free text, so "Alphabet Inc. Class A", "Google" and a bare "GOOGL" all have to be matched to the right share class by someone.
• Funds, options and bonds. Some trackers include ETFs, mutual funds, options and Treasury bills. Our Congress trades by stock pages stick to stocks.
• The scanned PDFs. A tracker that skips paper filings will undercount the members who still file on paper.
• The collection window. Late filings get added after the fact, so "last month" keeps changing for months.

When two sites disagree, the fix is to open the original filing. Every honest tracker should make that easy.

The Senate eFD bot block in October 2026

Around October 24, 2026, the Senate's eFD site started refusing automated requests with bot protection. Software that checks it on a schedule now gets turned away. The practical result: trackers that collect Senate filings automatically, including ours, stopped receiving new Senate reports after October 23, 2026. House collection still works normally.

We have not seen an announcement explaining the change, so we will not guess at the motive. It may be aimed at trackers, it may be a general security change that caught everyone. Either way, the Senate side of every automated Congress feed now has a hole in it that starts on October 23. If a tracker shows Senate trades filed after that date, check its notes for where they came from.

Why we will not try to get around the Senate block

Bot protection on a government website is the site owner saying no to automated access. Combined with a usage agreement that restricts how the reports may be used, we think the right answer is obvious: we are not going to try to get around it. Not with tricks, not with a workaround, not with a clever new approach.

Our rule for Congress data has always been simple. We publish public-record data, we put the source on screen next to it, and on our Congress trades page every line carries both the trade date and the filing date so nobody mistakes an old trade for a new one. Until the Senate offers a sanctioned way to collect its filings, our Senate data stops at the October 23 filings. A visible gap is better than data we should not have.

The honest fix: machine-readable disclosures

None of this would be a problem if Congress published its trades as data instead of documents. The House is partway there: the Clerk's yearly index already lists every filing in a structured form. But the trades themselves still live inside PDFs, and some of those PDFs are pictures of paper.

The fix is boring and cheap. Most filers already type their reports into an electronic system. Publish what they type as a downloadable file with one row per transaction: filer, owner, asset, ticker, trade type, trade date, filing date and bracket. Do it for both chambers, in the same format. Every tracker would then show the same numbers, scanned paper would stop being an excuse, and no one would need to hammer a search page to find out what was filed this week. Transparency that requires software to read a picture of a handwritten form is only transparency in theory.

If you want to read filings yourself, our guide on how to read Congress stock trades explains each field on a filing and what it leaves out. And if the theme of public data quietly disappearing sounds familiar, it is the same story we have been living with stock prices for years: see why free stock data keeps dying.

Congress trades on your TV

MarketCast is a stock market app for your TV, and its main feature is the Stream, a live stock market channel that plays your stocks, the indexes, the day's movers and headlines with a ticker tape along the bottom. Congress Trades is a scene in the Stream and a row on the dashboard that shows recently disclosed purchases and sales, with the source on screen. It is part of MarketCast Premium and is off until you turn it on in Settings. It is a public record, not a recommendation, and MarketCast does not give investment advice. You can download MarketCast free on Fire TV, Google TV and Apple TV, and browse the latest filings by stock on our Congress trades page. For the Senate, until something changes, the honest answer on our screens is a date where the data stops.