What Is the STOCK Act?

• →Periodic transaction reports (PTRs) for trades over $1,000 by the member, a spouse, or a dependent child.
• →Filing within 30 days of notice of the trade, and in any case within 45 days of the trade date.
• →Amounts reported as ranges ($1,001 to $15,000, $15,001 to $50,000, and so on).
• →Annual financial disclosures on top of the transaction reports.

Senate reports are filed through the Senate's electronic financial disclosure system. House reports are filed with the Clerk of the House, many still as scanned PDFs. Neither system sends alerts; both have to be polled. InsiderWatch reads both, parses the House PDFs, and keeps every captured trade in a durable record so it can be searched by member and by stock.

It does not ban members from trading individual stocks, and the penalty for a late report is a $200 fee that is often waived. Several bills to ban trading outright have been introduced; none had become law as of this writing. The practical result is that the public sees trades weeks after they happen, which is why the disclosure lag is the number to watch.

• →Members of the House and Senate, for trades made by themselves, a spouse, or a dependent child.
• →Senior congressional staff above a pay threshold, who file the same periodic transaction reports.
• →Senior executive-branch officials, who report through the Office of Government Ethics on their own transaction form.

Lower-paid staff and most federal employees are not required to file transaction reports, though the insider-trading prohibition applies to everyone who holds non-public information gained through their position.

The deadline has two parts. A report is due within 30 days of the filer being notified of the trade, for example by a brokerage confirmation, and in no case later than 45 days after the transaction itself. A member who learns of a spouse's trade three weeks after the fact has 30 days from that point, but never more than 45 days from the trade date. The report records both dates: the transaction date and the notification date. The gap between the transaction date and the date the filing is accepted is the disclosure lag, and it is the number InsiderWatch measures for every captured trade.

• →Purchases, sales and exchanges of stocks, bonds, commodity futures and other securities over $1,000.
• →Trades in the filer's own accounts, a spouse's accounts, and accounts of dependent children, marked by an owner code on the report.
• →The amount, as a range rather than an exact figure, from $1,001 to $15,000 at the bottom to over $50,000,000 at the top.

Widely held diversified mutual funds and US Treasury securities are excluded, so a member who only holds index funds files little. Trades in individual stocks, sector funds, bonds and options are all reportable.

A periodic transaction report is a table with one row per trade: owner (the member, spouse, dependent child, or joint), the asset name and ticker, the type of transaction (purchase, sale, partial sale, exchange), the transaction date, the notification date, and the amount range. House reports add a column noting whether a sale produced capital gains above $200. Some filings list dozens of rows from one brokerage statement, which is why a single member can account for a large share of a week's disclosures.

Senate reports are filed electronically and are searchable on the Senate's disclosure site. House reports are filed with the Clerk and published as PDFs, some of them scanned from paper, which is the main reason House data is harder to work with.

The ethics committees of each chamber administer the law. The standard penalty for a late report is a $200 fee, which can be waived, and it is applied per report rather than per trade. Insider trading by a member is prosecuted under the same securities laws that apply to anyone else, and the STOCK Act removed any argument that a member's duty to the public did not extend to the markets.

Since 2012 the debate has moved from disclosure to prohibition. Several bills would require members to place holdings in a blind trust or bar them from trading individual stocks altogether, and versions have advanced in committee with support from both parties. As of this writing, none had become law, and the disclosure regime described here is still the rule.