Short answer first. Congress trades like an index fund with opinions. Our database holds 8,674 congressional stock trades from periodic transaction reports, and the buy-sell split is nearly even, 4,213 purchases against 4,461 sales, nothing like the four-to-one selling skew in insider filings. What members buy is just as concentrated: the top of the list is mega-cap technology, led by Microsoft at 171 trades and NVIDIA at 153.
The census
| Measure | Count | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Congressional trades in the database | 8,674 | Periodic transaction reports on file |
| Buys | 4,213 (49%) | Against 4,461 sells (51%) |
| House Republicans | 4,248 filings | Largest filer group |
| House Democrats | 3,734 filings | Plus 692 House filings without a party tag |
| Most traded ticker | Microsoft, 171 trades | Then NVIDIA 153, Apple 121 |
The even split is the first correction to the popular picture. Insider selling is structural, because executives are paid in shares; congressional trading is discretionary portfolio management, and it behaves like it, two-sided and benchmark-hugging. The filer base in this database is the House: 4,248 filings tagged Republican and 3,734 Democrat, with Senate disclosures tracked separately in our Senate tracker guide. Our explainer on what the filings actually show covers the disclosure rules behind these numbers, including the 45-day reporting lag that limits what any trade can signal.
What Congress trades most
The lag deserves its own number, because it disciplines every use of this data. Across the 8,531 congressional trades in our database where both dates are usable, the median gap between the trade and its public disclosure is 28 days, and 13.9 percent of filings arrived after the 45-day window the STOCK Act allows. Insider filings, by contrast, show a median lag of two days. Congressional data is a record, not a feed, and any tool presenting it as real-time is selling the 28 days as if they were zero.
Seven of the eight most traded tickers are technology or technology-adjacent giants, the same names that dominate the index most members' portfolios are measured against. The honest reading is that congressional filings are a sentiment sample of wealthy American households with better disclosure, not a tip sheet: by the time a periodic transaction report is public, the trade is weeks old. Counted properly, as this census counts them, the filings are still useful, as a record of what the political class owned while it legislated.
Sources: news hub form modeled on Investing.com, Earnings Reports and Whispers: Latest News. All counts from this site's congressional trades database (8,674 records), computed November 5, 2026.