Methodology & Sources

Every number on this site traces to an official public record. This page explains where the data comes from, how the flags are computed — and, just as important, where the pipeline can be wrong. An accountability product owes you its own accounting.

Sources

We use no aggregators. Aggregators republish the same filings; going to the record directly means our numbers can be checked against the source by anyone — every trade links to its filing.

Update cadence

The pipeline runs daily (~11:00 UTC), pulls new filings from all sources, re-computes every view, and publishes only after automated data-quality gates pass — a 100+ check logic suite, plus deploy gates verifying that every amount is a legal disclosure bracket and every count is internally consistent. If a gate fails, the site keeps yesterday's data rather than publish something wrong.

Where AI is used — and where it can't reach

AI reads and synthesizes; it never records. The trade ledger — every trade, amount, date, and filer — comes straight from the filings, parser to page, untouched by any model. AI-written layers (signal reads, the weekly briefing, Themes) are generated only from the site's own data and are validated before anything publishes; output that fails validation is never shown.

Investment Themes (Pro)

Themes are a weekly synthesis of the evidence already on this site — nothing external, no news media. Two promises: a theme is published only when two or more independent evidence types point at the same story (congressional clusters, executive-branch trades, policy signals, contracts & lobbying, insider flow, company events, market reaction), and every theme carries a counter-argument — the strongest honest reason it might be wrong or already priced in. Each shows its as-of date and updates weekly. Themes are observations about where evidence agrees — context to research, not recommendations.

The flags

Late filing (⏰). The STOCK Act requires transactions be reported within 45 days. A filing is flagged late when it lands more than 45 days after the transaction, and the flag shows how many days past that deadline it was (a "24d past deadline" trade was disclosed 69 days after it happened). Same rule for Congress and the executive branch alike. One honest caveat: the executive branch dominates the raw late count because the President reports in large batches — which is why the site shows the congressional and executive late counts separately rather than one blended number.

Committee-sector overlap (△). Flagged when a member trades a stock in a sector overseen by a committee they sit on. It is context, not an accusation — committee jurisdictions are broad, and the mapping (committee → sector) is deliberately coarse. Ambiguous member-name matches are dropped rather than guessed.

Convergence (◆). A ticker where disclosed trading and an active policy signal touch the same stock in the same window. Convergence is coincidence-surfacing, not causation — it tells you where to look, not what to conclude.

Amounts

Disclosures report dollar ranges, not exact figures ($1,001–$15,000 up to $25M+). We show the disclosed bracket, never a made-up midpoint presented as precision, and every displayed amount is validated against the standard bracket set before publish.

Conviction Score (Pro)

A 0–100 score of the filer's disclosed behavior: is this bet unusual for them? Components are facts from the record — an options contract rather than stock, size several multiples of that filer's own typical trade, a transaction dated shortly before a policy signal touching the same ticker, corroborating member clusters or insider activity, a committee-sector overlap. The score describes conduct. It is not a prediction of returns, not a recommendation, and not investment advice — our own backtest (below) is the reason we won't pretend otherwise.

Returns vs SPY

Every "vs SPY" figure is the same calculation. Entry is the first trading day on or after the disclosure date — deliberately. The disclosure is the first moment anyone outside the filer could act, so lag-inclusive performance is the correct measure of what following these filings is worth, not a limitation of it. Exit is the latest close (a held-to-today assumption; actual exits aren't knowable). Prices are dividend- and split-adjusted, and excess = the stock's return minus SPY's over the exact same window. Buys only — we don't assume anyone shorts a disclosed sale.

The leaderboard adds two guards against the ways scoreboards lie: a member needs 10+ priced buys to appear at all (below that is noise, not skill), and each trade's excess is capped at ±100% before averaging so one moonshot — or one bad price tick — can't crown someone who mostly underperforms. Delisted tickers can't be priced and drop out; note that this bias flatters measured returns, and the scoreboard still shows no systematic edge.

The two clocks — and what the lag actually costs

Every trade has two possible entry dates: the member's clock (the transaction date — how did the filer's own timing do?) and the copier's clock (the disclosure date — the first day anyone else could act). We measured both across ~3,300 priced House buys from 2024–2025. The result inverts the folklore: the lag segment itself — trade date to disclosure, median 21 days — averaged −1.1% against SPY. The "head start" was the worst-performing stretch. And on their own clock, members showed no timing skill either (six-month excess significantly negative). The 45-day window isn't hiding alpha from the public; there was no alpha on either clock. Caveats: overlapping windows cluster (significance overstated), and delisted names drop out — a bias that flatters these numbers, which are negative anyway.

The Signal Lab

The copy-trade folklore deserves better than marketing claims in either direction — so we run it as a public experiment. Six strategies (copy everything, big bets, options, committee overlap, convergence, high conviction) were pre-registered before forward tracking began: rules frozen, every strategy reported every week, wins and losses alike, each against SPY bought the same day, entries at the disclosure date because that's the only trade a member of the public can actually make. A rule can never change after registration — a changed rule retires the strategy in public and starts a successor from zero. The copy-congress ETFs (NANC, KRUZ) race alongside as the market's real-money version. Paper positions, equal-weight, no transaction costs (which flatters every strategy — noted). The scoreboard reports what happened. It is not a recommendation of anything.

Known limitations

Corrections

See something wrong? Every trade links to its underlying filing — check us, then tell us: hello@bullandgavel.com. Corrections ship in the next daily run.