Why Are Congress Stock Trades Reported in Ranges?

• →$1,001 to $15,000
• →$15,001 to $50,000
• →$50,001 to $100,000
• →$100,001 to $250,000
• →$250,001 to $500,000
• →$500,001 to $1,000,000
• →$1,000,001 to $5,000,000
• →$5,000,001 to $25,000,000
• →$25,000,001 to $50,000,000
• →Over $50,000,000

A trade reported as $250,001 to $500,000 could be a quarter million or half a million. Ranking by the lower bound is conservative and consistent, which is why InsiderWatch sorts and sums Congress trades by the bottom of each range and never presents a midpoint as a real number. Return calculations on range-reported trades are noise for the same reason, so we do not publish per-member returns.

The ranges are not a STOCK Act invention. They come from the Ethics in Government Act's schedule of "categories of value", the same bands used on the annual financial disclosure for assets, income and liabilities. When the STOCK Act added the periodic transaction report in 2012, it reused the existing categories, so a $30,000 stock purchase is disclosed in the same way as a $30,000 bank account: as $15,001 to $50,000.

There is a wrinkle at the top of the scale. For assets and transactions held by a spouse or a dependent child alone, anything above $1,000,000 is reported simply as "Over $1,000,000". The finer bands above that figure apply only to the member's own holdings and to joint holdings. A spouse's $20 million trade and a spouse's $1.5 million trade therefore look identical on the report, which matters for the members whose largest trades are made in a spouse's account.

Every range except the top is bounded, so three honest numbers exist for any trade: the minimum, the maximum, and the fact that the truth is somewhere between. A tracker that shows a midpoint is inventing a figure; one that shows the maximum overstates every trade by design. The lower bound is conservative and consistent across filers, and sums of lower bounds are true "at least" totals. That is how InsiderWatch ranks trades, totals a member's activity, and describes every figure on the site: "up to" for a single trade, "at least" for a sum.

The same logic rules out per-member returns. A purchase of $15,001 to $50,000 followed by a sale of $50,001 to $100,000 is consistent with a small gain, a large gain, or a second purchase in between that was never reported as a matched pair. Any percentage built on those inputs is a guess dressed as a statistic.

• →Relative size across a member's own filings: a member whose trades are mostly $1,001 to $15,000 and then files one over $1,000,000 has done something unusual.
• →The floor of activity: at least $X bought in a stock across many members in a month is a real number.
• →Concentration: many trades in the same stock at large ranges from one member, over months, describes a position even without exact figures.

The live panel on this page shows the current distribution of disclosed ranges across the trades InsiderWatch has captured.