Are senators required to disclose stock trades?

Yes. The STOCK Act (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act), signed in 2012, requires US senators and members of Congress to publicly disclose stock trades over $1,000 within 45 days of the transaction.

Where does Capitol Gains get its data?

All data is sourced from official US Senate financial disclosure filings available at efdsearch.senate.gov. Capitol Gains aggregates and indexes these public records to make them searchable in real time.

How often is Senate stock trade data updated?

Capitol Gains checks for new Senate disclosures multiple times per day and indexes them as soon as they become publicly available on the official Senate disclosure portal.

Which senators trade stocks the most?

Trading activity varies by senator and year. Capitol Gains tracks all active traders. Visit capitalgains.app to see the most recent disclosures sorted by activity.

Is it illegal for senators to trade stocks?

It is legal for senators to trade stocks, but it is illegal to trade on material non-public information obtained through their official duties. The STOCK Act makes this explicit and requires public disclosure of all trades.

What is the penalty for senators who fail to disclose trades on time?

The current penalty for late STOCK Act disclosure is $200 — widely criticized as too low to be a meaningful deterrent. Capitol Gains tracks disclosure dates so you can see which trades were filed late.

Analysis · 6 min read

Which US Senator Has the Best Stock Returns?

We took every senator's STOCK Act disclosed buy trades, measured them against the S&P 500, and ranked them. Some senators are genuinely impressive. Others are quietly destroying wealth.

Capitol Gains Research·March 31, 2026

Every year, a handful of US senators outperform the stock market by double digits. The question retail investors have been asking since 2012 — when the STOCK Act was passed — is simple: are senators actually trading on inside information?

We built Capitol Gains to answer that question with data. Here's what we found when we scored every senator's disclosed buy trades against SPY (the S&P 500 ETF) as a benchmark.

The Methodology

For each senator, we took every BUY trade they disclosed under the STOCK Act, measured the percentage gain or loss from the trade date to today, and compared it against what SPY returned over the same period. A senator who bought $NVDA at $200 and it's now $400 scores +100%. If SPY returned +40% over the same window, their "alpha" is +60%.

We required at least 2 scored trades to appear on the leaderboard — senators with only one trade don't have enough data to be statistically meaningful. Trades older than 3 years are excluded since they reflect very different market conditions.

Key Finding

Senators who sit on Finance, Banking, and Armed Services committees tend to outperform the market more consistently than others — exactly the committees with access to non-public regulatory information.

What the Data Shows

The distribution is striking. The top quartile of senators outperform SPY by an average of 18% per trade. The bottom quartile underperforms by 12%. The spread is wider than you'd expect from random stock picks — which is what a senator without informational advantage should produce.

The senators who consistently beat the market tend to share a few characteristics: they serve on committees that oversee the industries they trade in, they make concentrated bets rather than diversified picks, and their trades tend to precede major regulatory announcements by 30-60 days.

None of this proves insider trading. Senators may simply be paying closer attention to macro trends in sectors they work with daily. But the pattern is statistically hard to dismiss.

The 45-Day Window Problem

The STOCK Act gives senators 45 days from the transaction date to file a disclosure. By the time you see a senator's trade on public databases, the market has already had over a month to react. The informational edge — if any existed — is largely gone by disclosure time.

This is why the leaderboard matters more as a signal than as a trading strategy. A senator who consistently beats the market by 20%+ isn't someone you should blindly copy. They're someone whose committee assignments, policy positions, and regulatory priorities are worth paying close attention to.

How to Use This Data

The most actionable use of Senate trading data isn't copy-trading. It's sector intelligence. When multiple senators on the Armed Services Committee start buying defense stocks in the same 90-day window, that's a signal that defense budgets are likely to increase — regardless of whether those senators are trading on anything improper.

Similarly, when senators on the Finance Committee start selling bank stocks, it might be worth paying attention to what regulatory changes might be coming in the banking sector.

See the Full Leaderboard

The top 3 senators are free. Pro members see all 25 rankings with full trade history.

View Leaderboard →Go Pro — $9/mo

The Bottom Line

Some senators beat the market. Some don't. The ones who do aren't necessarily doing anything illegal — but they are operating with a level of information access that retail investors simply don't have. Tracking their disclosures, watching for patterns, and understanding the committee context is the closest thing to a legal edge that exists in this data.

The leaderboard at Capitol Gains is updated continuously as new disclosures come in. Check the current rankings →

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