Capitol Trades

What it is

Capitol Trades is a web front end over the periodic transaction reports that members of the US House and Senate file under the STOCK Act. 2iQ Research, a Frankfurt insider-data vendor, launched it in August 2021 and has given it away since. Its own disclaimer names the sources: the Senate's electronic financial disclosure system and the Clerk of the House, with the ProPublica Congress API used to cross-check member details.

On 14 September 2026 the trades listing reported 37,219 trades from 1,806 filings, 2.274 billion dollars of volume, 211 politicians and 3,058 issuers — all of it inside a rolling three-year window. Each row carries the traded date, the published date, a "filed after N days" counter, the owner (undisclosed, spouse or joint), the disclosed size band and a price. Fifteen filters sit above it: politician and issuer search boxes, plus committee, party, congress chamber, politician state, asset type, transaction type, trade size, market cap, issuer state, transaction label, gender, sector and issuer country.

The other two entry points are an issuer list — 3,058 traded securities ranked by volume, trades and number of politicians, filterable by market cap, sector, state and country — and a politician list with per-member bios, committees and trading history.

Pricing

Free, with nothing to buy. There is no account, no login, no paid tier, no trial and no donation ask, and the site says making it free is the point.

The business it feeds is upstream. 2iQ Research sells insider-transaction data on more than 60,000 stocks to hedge funds and quantitative managers through a feed, an API and a scoring model, and publishes no prices for any of it. Capitol Trades is the demonstration, which is worth knowing before treating its roadmap as a commitment to anybody.

Data & coverage

US federal legislators only — House and Senate, no state legislatures, no executive branch, no federal judges. Every ticker in the listing is a US line.

The asset-type filter carries 22 values, well beyond equities: stock, non-public stock, preferred shares, ETF, ETN, mutual fund, stock options, futures, crypto, corporate bond, municipal security, REIT, variable annuity, private equity and venture capital funds, ownership interests and several "other" buckets. That breadth is not decoration — the single most-traded issuer on the site is US Treasury bills, at 323 million dollars of disclosed volume across 504 trades on that same date, ahead of Microsoft.

Prices are context rather than product. An issuer page shows a last price with 1D, 7D, 30D, 6M, 1Y and YTD changes; Amazon read 256.78 unchanged across five minutes of a Monday session, so treat it as a daily figure and not a quote.

Integrations

None. No API, no export, no webhooks, no spreadsheet add-in, no MCP server. Pushed data amounts to a weekly newsletter and an X account that posts trades as they publish.

Limitations

• The lag is statutory and cannot be engineered away. A member files within 30 days of notification and no later than 45 days after the trade, so a "congressional trade" is history by the time it is public. Late filings are worse and the site shows exactly how bad — that 466-day reporting gap.
• Three years of history, rolling. A window that short rules out most of what a researcher would want the data for.
• No amounts, only bands, the smallest of which is 1K–15K. Every dollar total on the site, including the headline volume, is an inference from ranges. Anything at or below $1,000 is not reportable at all: the statute covers securities transactions that exceed $1,000 (5 U.S.C. § 13104(a)(5)), so the floor of the data is a legal threshold, not a display choice.
• Nothing machine-readable. Reading is free; getting the data out is not offered at any price.
• The site is marketing for a paid institutional feed. That does not make the numbers wrong, but a free product with no customers has no obligations to them either.

Alternatives

Quiver Quantitative is the closest thing in shape — the same disclosure data, but over a REST API and with the history and the export Capitol Trades does not offer. Unusual Whales carries congressional and insider disclosures alongside the options tape, for a reader already paying for flow. Finnhub and Financial Modeling Prep both expose congressional trading as one endpoint among many. For the filings themselves, the House and Senate disclosure systems are free and authoritative and offer no filtering at all. The rest of the category is at insider, 13F and congressional trade trackers.