How late Congress files its trades

On August 5, 2026, Senator Tommy Tuberville disclosed 163 stock trades in one filing. The oldest was a sale of Applied Materials made on March 8, 2024. That is 880 days between the trade and the public finding out, against a law that allows 45.

The STOCK Act requires members of Congress to report a securities trade within 30 days of learning about it and no later than 45 days after it happens. The penalty for missing that window is $200. Here is how the members we track have done against it.

The numbers

We hold 3,418 trades from 93 members, disclosed between October 2023 and September 2026, taken from Senate eFD filings and House Clerk periodic transaction reports.

• 1,914 trades were disclosed within 30 days.
• 584 more landed between day 31 and day 45, inside the law.
• 37 were between 46 and 90 days late.
• 608 were disclosed more than 90 days and up to a year after the trade.
• 275 were disclosed more than a year after the trade.

So 920 trades, 27 percent, missed the 45-day line. The average lag across everything is 98 days, but that average is misleading, because the lateness is not spread around. It is concentrated.

It is a batch problem

Of the 52 members with at least five trades on file, 37 have never filed one late. Nine are late on most of theirs. The gap between those groups is almost entirely explained by a few large catch-up filings.

Senator Tuberville's August filing covered trades from March 2024 through December 2025. Representative Julia Letlow disclosed 191 trades on January 13, 2026 covering October 2024 through December 2025. Senator Alan Armstrong disclosed 367 trades on July 21, 2026 covering March 24 to June 24 of this year, every one of them between 115 and 119 days old. Representative Tim Walberg's 16 trades average 428 days from trade to disclosure.

Take those four out and the picture flips. Most members file inside the window, many of them well inside it.

Who files fast

Representative Matt Van Epps has 13 trades on file with an average lag of one day. Representative Steve Cohen averages two days across nine trades. Senators Tina Smith and John Fetterman average five. Representative Nancy Pelosi, the name most people search for, has 16 trades on file averaging 20 days, the slowest at 30. Representative Josh Gottheimer, one of the most active traders in the dataset with 107 trades, averages 30 days and has never gone past 43.

Why the lag matters more than the trade

A trade disclosed a month later is a piece of information. A trade disclosed two years later is a piece of history. Whatever the member knew, and whatever the market did after, is long priced in by the time a late batch lands. If you are copying a member's trades, the disclosure lag is the number that decides whether the copy means anything. Our copy-trade backtester buys on the disclosure date, not the trade date, for exactly this reason, and it is why some members with good-looking trades still lose to the index.

[ADAM: your read]

What we count and what we do not

A "trade" here is one line on a periodic transaction report: one ticker, one date, one amount range. A single filing can carry hundreds of lines, which is why one late filing can move a member's average by months. We count late as more than 45 days from the transaction date to the disclosure date shown on the filing. Amendments that restate an earlier filing keep the original disclosure date. The dataset starts in late October 2023, so a member who filed late in 2022 and on time since looks clean here.

Every member's lag, trade by trade, is on their page.

Opinion and personal record, not investment advice.