The STOCK Act, Explained
The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 — Public Law 112-105 — requires every member of the United States Congress, their spouse, and their dependent children to publicly disclose any stock, bond, options, or commodity trade above $1,000 within 45 days of the trade. Disclosures are filed with the Office of the Clerk of the House (for House members) or the Secretary of the Senate (for senators), where they become public-record Periodic Transaction Reports (PTRs).
What the law actually covers
Individual stocks, individual bonds, options, futures, and commodity contracts above the $1,000 threshold. Each disclosed transaction includes the trade date, the disclosure date, the asset description, a value-range band ($1,001–$15,000, $15,001–$50,000, and so on up to over $50 million), and the transaction type (purchase, sale, exchange).
What's exempt
Trades under $1,000 do not require disclosure. Mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, money-market funds, U.S. Treasury securities, and U.S. Government bonds are exempt — the rationale being that the member has no discretion over the underlying holdings. Cryptocurrency is covered under the same threshold as stocks. Real estate is covered separately under annual financial disclosure rules, not the 45-day PTR mechanism.
The 45-day window
A member who personally executes a trade has 45 days. A member whose trade was executed by a third party (broker, spouse, financial adviser) gets an additional 30 days, for a 75-day window from trade date to disclosure deadline. Filings past those windows incur a $200 per-violation late fee, paid from the member's office account or personal funds.
The fine doesn't escalate. A member who files every disclosure 200 days late pays $200 per filing — no compounding, no suspension, no escalating sanction. That's why chronic late filers are tracked publicly: the financial penalty is too small to deter, but the public-record receipt is the actual enforcement mechanism.
Is it illegal for Congress members to trade?
No. The STOCK Act is a disclosure law, not a divestiture law. Members may actively trade individual stocks, including in companies and sectors their committee oversees. The law clarifies that Congress members are not exempt from federal insider-trading statutes if they trade on material non-public information obtained through official duties — but no member has been criminally prosecuted under the STOCK Act alone. Civil enforcement is rare.
Reform proposals
Several bills have been introduced to ban individual stock trading by members of Congress outright, requiring divestiture or transfer to a true blind trust (qualified blind trust per the Office of Government Ethics, not the colloquial sense). Sponsors have varied across parties and Congresses; none have advanced to floor passage as of this writing.
Where Blind Trust fits
Blind Trust ingests every PTR from the House and Senate clerk offices, normalizes them, and surfaces the patterns: late filings, vote-trade overlaps, committee-jurisdiction conflicts, sector clusters. Reader's guide → · Scoring methodology → · Live late-filer rankings →