What Is the STOCK Act?
The short answer. The STOCK Act — the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 — makes explicit that members of Congress and federal employees are not exempt from insider trading law, and requires them to publicly disclose securities transactions over $1,000 within 45 days. It did not ban them from trading. Enforcement of the disclosure requirement is a $200 late fee.
What does the STOCK Act actually require?
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
| Who | Members of Congress, senior staff, senior executive-branch officials, and their spouses and dependent children |
| What | Any purchase, sale or exchange of stocks, bonds or commodity futures over $1,000 |
| When | Within 30 days of learning of the transaction, and no later than 45 days after it |
| Detail | A value band, not an exact amount |
| Penalty | $200 for a late filing, waivable |
The Act was passed after a 60 Minutes segment and Peter Schweizer's book Throw Them Out drew attention to congressional trading during the 2008 financial crisis. It passed 96–3 in the Senate and 417–2 in the House.
Did it work?
Partially, and in the narrower of the two possible senses. Disclosure genuinely improved: the filings exist, they are public, and an entire ecosystem of trackers, newsletters and even exchange-traded funds is built on them. That transparency is real and it is why any of this is knowable.
What it did not do is change behaviour much. Members still trade individual stocks, including in industries their committees oversee. Late filings are frequent and the penalty is $200. In 2013 the requirement to make senior staff filings searchable online was quietly repealed by unanimous consent in both chambers.
What is the Stop Insider Trading Act?
The 2026 successor. It passed the House on 22 July 2026 by 232 to 198, with 13 Democrats joining all Republicans. It would bar members, spouses and dependent children from buying new individual stocks, require seven days' public notice before a sale, and set penalties at $2,000 or 10% of the transaction, whichever is greater. Existing holdings could be retained and eventually sold. Its Senate prospects are uncertain.
Does congressional trading actually beat the market?
The honest answer is that it depends heavily on who is counted, over what period, and how the value bands are handled — and that the studies disagree. Some find outperformance concentrated in a small number of prolific traders; others find nothing once you correct for the fact that disclosed amounts are ranges rather than figures. Anyone quoting a single confident percentage is being more precise than the data allows.
What this cannot tell you
Whether any individual trade was improper. A trade in a company your committee oversees is a conflict of interest. That is a different thing, and a lower bar, than insider trading.
Educational information, not financial advice. Every figure on this page is read from the source filings when the page loads rather than written into the article, so what you are reading is today's data and not a snapshot of the day it was published.
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