Two things we can now see that we couldn't last week
This week the Brief is about the site rather than the market, because two new things went live and both of them answer questions I've wanted to answer since I started this. One is about members of Congress trading in industries they help regulate. The other is about how long they take to tell anyone. Both are built entirely from public records, and both are free to read.
1. When Congress trades what it oversees
Members of Congress sit on committees that write the rules for particular industries, and they also buy and sell shares. Those two facts have always been public, but they live in different places, so nobody joins them up. We now do: 568 disclosed trades, by 44 members, across 16 committees, where someone traded a company in a sector their own committee oversees — about 3% of every disclosure we hold. The clearest example is a representative on the House Armed Services Committee who bought Lockheed Martin, RTX and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest defence contractors in the country, in three separate disclosures over the past year. A senator on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee bought Exxon and Chevron. None of this is illegal and none of it is an accusation: it is legal, it was properly disclosed, and trades are often directed by an adviser rather than the member. It is simply something you should be able to look up, and until now you couldn't.
2. The 45-day rule, and who ignores it
The STOCK Act gives members 45 days to disclose a trade. Most of the House clears that comfortably — the median delay across 13,131 disclosures is 28 days, and 88 of the 101 members we can measure are inside the deadline. The tail is where it gets strange. One former representative filed 566 disclosures and was late on 99% of them, with a typical delay of 343 days. Another averaged 471 days. The penalty for filing late is a $200 fee. You can now see every member ranked by how long they actually take, and I've been careful to explain on the page why senators are excluded: the Senate archive we can get doesn't publish a separate filing date, so including them would score all of them as flawless same-day filers, which would be false.
3. What changed on the model
Not much, which is the honest answer most weeks. The highest-confidence names are still Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft — the stocks the largest number of tracked managers hold at once. As a reminder of the scoreboard: in the backtest the model beat the S&P 500 in 12 of 16 quarters, which means it lost in 4. If a week is quiet, this section will say so rather than manufacture a reason to trade.