How to Read a Congressional Periodic Transaction Report

A field-by-field guide to the Periodic Transaction Reports members of Congress file: owner codes, transaction types, notification date, amount ranges and what is easy to misread.

Under the STOCK Act, members of Congress file a Periodic Transaction Report (PTR) when they or their family trade securities. The form looks simple, but several fields are easy to misread.

The fields that matter

Filer. The member of Congress (or covered staff member) who files.

Owner. Whose account the trade was in. Common values are the member themselves, SP (spouse), DC (dependent child) and JT (joint). A trade by a spouse is still reportable, but it does not mean the member made the decision.

Asset. Usually a company name and ticker, but it can also be bonds, options, funds or other assets, sometimes with a free-text description.

Transaction type. Purchase, Sale (full), Sale (partial) or Exchange. House filings abbreviate these. A partial sale means the owner kept some of the position, which tells you more than a plain "sale".

Transaction date. When the trade happened.

Notification date. When the filer was notified of the trade. The 30 days start here, and the 45-day outer limit runs from the transaction date.

Amount. A range, never an exact figure ($1,001 to $15,000, $15,001 to $50,000 and so on up to the higher bands).

Capital gains flag. Some forms ask whether a sale produced capital gains above a small threshold. It is not a measure of profit.

Common ways to misread it

1. Treating the amount as a precise value. A "$15,001 to $50,000" trade could be either end. Use the band for rough size only.
2. Ignoring the owner. Counting a spouse's or a managed account's trade as the member's personal call.
3. Confusing the dates. The filing date can be weeks after the trade. Always look at the transaction date, then see how far the stock moved before the filing was public.
4. Reading one trade as a position. A purchase and a partial sale in the same stock in one month can leave the owner almost where they started.
5. Missing amendments. Corrected filings exist, so the same trade can appear twice if you copy data without matching.
6. Overlooking non-stock assets. Options and bonds are not the same bet as shares.

What is more useful than one trade

Patterns: the same ticker across several members, a sector that keeps showing up, or activity just before a known policy event, though remember the delay and the mixed research record.

Where the data lives

The House and Senate publish their filings on separate sites, in different formats. Bourse reads both, cleans the names and tickers and shows each trade with its owner, amount band and dates beside insider filings and 13F holdings.

Bourse provides financial data and editorial information, parts of which are generated by AI. This page is for general education only. It is not personalised investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any financial instrument. Make your own decisions.