Michael McCaul is not making headlines this week. Zero Google News stories in the last 24 hours. Zero. The congressman from Texas's 10th district, former chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, is enjoying the rare Washington luxury of not being yelled about on cable. His broker, however, has been busy. Per public disclosure filings, McCaul logged 56 stock trades in the last 90 days, including 15 trades across a five-day window at the end of April alone. That's a portfolio that gets managed.
The Five-Day Sprint
Walk through the last week of April and it looks less like passive investing and more like someone refreshing a trading terminal between floor votes.
April 24: McCaul buys EQT, the natural gas producer, in the $15K-$50K range. Same day, he sells Shell in the same range. He's rotating out of integrated oil and into a pure-play natural gas name. Fine. A choice.
April 27: He buys Mastercard, then sells Mastercard. Same stock, one day apart. He also sells Visa that day. He picks up shares of Schneider Electric's ADR (SMNEY) and adds a position in Pandora (ticker: P). Four trades in a single session.
April 28: Four more. Purchases of Danaher, S&P Global, Mastercard again, and Workday. All in the $1K-$15K range.
April 29: He buys Teradyne in the $15K-$50K range, adds Intuit, dumps Vulcan Materials, and sells GE Vernova in the $15K-$50K range. Five trades.
April 30: One sale, NVAER, capping the run.
Fifteen disclosed transactions in five trading days. Members are required to disclose. They are not required to divest, recuse, abstain, blush, or look up from their phones.
What the Scorecard Actually Says
Here's where it gets more complicated than "congressman trades stocks, film at eleven."
Blind Trust has scored 119 of McCaul's trades on 30-day alpha versus the S&P 500. The record: 52 positive, 67 negative. Mean 30-day alpha: negative 1.3 percent. He's losing to the index, on average, after you run the full sample. Not dramatically. But he's not beating the market. He's the market's slightly underperforming cousin.
The best individual trades look good in isolation. A purchase of Humana on April 10 returned 34.5% alpha over 30 days. An Insight Enterprises buy on April 23 clocked 22.7%. The Teradyne purchase from April 29 is sitting at plus 21.7% over 30 days. None of those have committee overlap flags.
The worst trades are equally instructive. He sold Chevron on March 23 and the 30-day alpha on that sale came in at negative 18.8 percent, meaning the stock went up after he got out. He sold Shell on March 31 and took a negative 15.3% alpha hit. He sold Vulcan Materials on April 29: also negative 15.3%. Three energy and materials sales, all going the wrong way.
A 52-for-119 record at minus 1.3% mean alpha is what it is. The receipts are public. Make of them what you make of them.
The Committee Overlap Problem
McCaul sits on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the House Committee on Homeland Security. His subcommittee assignments cover East Asia and Pacific, and Europe. Foreign policy. Intelligence. Border security. Not financial services. Not technology sector regulation.
Which makes the committee overlap flags in his trade record worth a second look, because the overlap categories attached to some of his trades don't match his actual committee remit. The data shows five trades flagged with committee overlap: three Intuit purchases (March 2 and March 12) and a MercadoLibre purchase (March 12) flagged under "Technology," plus an S&P Global purchase (March 24) flagged under "Financial Services."
McCaul is not on the House Financial Services Committee. He is not on any technology-focused committee. He's on Foreign Affairs and Homeland Security. A floor vote on a banking bill is not the same thing as sitting in a markup session for that banking bill. The distinction matters.
His April 28 S&P Global purchase is the same ticker he bought in March. The March trade had a 3.9% 30-day alpha. His April 29 Intuit purchase echoes two earlier Intuit buys. He's returning to names he's held. Whether that reflects conviction or something else, the filings don't say.
The Votes
McCaul voted yes on the American Access to Banking Act on May 20. He voted yes on the Financial Exploitation Prevention Act on June 25. He voted yes on the Keeping Deposits Local Act, also May 20. These are financial sector bills. McCaul is not on Financial Services. His vote on these is the same as any other rank-and-file member casting a floor vote: he's a yes, he goes home.
The vote-trade overlap tracker shows no flagged overlaps for McCaul. The April flurry of financial sector trades predates the June financial votes by two months. The calendar doesn't give you a story here.
He skipped the TRIA reauthorization vote on June 29, a bill with direct insurance industry relevance, marking "Not Voting." He also skipped the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act on June 23. A member who trades this actively and misses two market-relevant votes in the same month is at least an interesting data point.
He voted yes on extending FISA surveillance authorities on June 11. That bill failed. His committee does touch intelligence and homeland security, so that vote lands squarely in his lane. No trades in the data set overlap with that vote.
The Social Chatter
McCaul's name is circulating on Bluesky this week, with four posts mentioning him. The content: he's appearing in lists of members flagged for ASML trades, named alongside a dozen other House members in what looks like automated disclosure tracking. The posts are not about a specific McCaul story. He's a name in a list. The social buzz score is four, which is barely a blip.
One post zeroes in on the ASML angle specifically, noting that members who've traded the Dutch semiconductor equipment company while sitting on committees with technology or trade oversight create an information asymmetry question worth asking. McCaul does show ASML-adjacent activity in the broader disclosure record, though the structured data for this piece flags no ASML position in the most recent 15 trades.
Foreign Affairs does cover export controls, technology transfer policy, and the chip-war diplomacy that's made ASML a geopolitical flashpoint. That's closer to his actual lane than any banking bill he's voted on this spring. The Venn diagram between "House Foreign Affairs" and "semiconductor export policy" is not two non-overlapping circles.
The Broader Pattern
Fifty-six trades in 90 days works out to roughly one disclosed trade every 1.6 calendar days. That pace puts McCaul well above the typical congressional disclosure cadence, where many members file a handful of trades per quarter or route everything through a blind trust to avoid the conversation entirely.
McCaul's disclosed trades span energy (EQT, Shell, Chevron, GE Vernova), payments (Mastercard, Visa), industrial materials (Vulcan Materials), healthcare (Humana), financial data (S&P Global), enterprise software (Workday, Intuit, ServiceNow), and semiconductors. It's a generalist portfolio run at a trader's pace.
The mean alpha of negative 1.3% on 119 scored trades says he's not systematically printing money off these positions. The 52-for-119 win rate says he's right less than half the time. His three best trades in the sample, HUM, NSIT, and TER, carry no committee overlap and no attached vote. His three worst trades were all sales in energy names that subsequently rallied.
What the filings don't contain: any indication of who is executing these trades, whether they're directed or discretionary, or what information, if any, informs the timing. The STOCK Act requires disclosure. It does not require explanation.
McCaul's full disclosure record is public. Fifty-six trades, 90 days, a Foreign Affairs chairman who rotates between natural gas producers and payments processors at a clip that would make a retail day trader feel validated. Take that for what it's worth.