When Congress passed the STOCK Act in 2012, the stated goal was transparency. Members of Congress would be required to disclose personal stock trades within 45 days. The public would finally be able to see what the people writing America's laws were buying and selling.
Fourteen years later, the data tells a story nobody fully anticipated.
What We Found
After building a live monitor that pulls every House Clerk disclosure in real time, cross-referencing member trades against committee assignments and scoring them by conviction signals, a pattern emerges that goes beyond simple "Congress beats the market" headlines.
The edge isn't uniform. It's concentrated.
Members who trade stocks in sectors directly overseen by their committees outperform members trading outside their committee jurisdiction by a significant margin. This isn't surprising in isolation — but the timing pattern is.
The most significant trades cluster in the 30 days before major committee votes, regulatory announcements, and agency decisions. Not after. Before.
This is the committee edge. It's legal. It's documented. And it's hiding in plain sight in public filings updated daily.
Today's Signal: The Activist Layer
This afternoon our monitor caught something worth noting. Saba Capital Management — one of the most aggressive activist investors in closed-end funds — filed on two positions simultaneously:
MXF (Mexico Fund): $229,743 total, score 135
GF (Aberdeen Greater China Fund): $661,661 total, score 160
Saba doesn't make small bets. When they file on a closed-end fund, they're typically building toward a shareholder activism campaign — pushing for tender offers, open-ending the fund, or liquidation. Their historical return on these campaigns is well-documented.
This is a different kind of insider signal than congressional trading — it's institutional activism made visible through public filings. Same data source. Same infrastructure. Different playbook.
The Compound Signal
The most powerful signal in our system isn't congressional trading alone, and it isn't corporate insider buying alone. It's when both point at the same ticker simultaneously.
This morning: AUPH.
AUPH — Aurinia Pharmaceuticals. Kevin Tang, the company's newly appointed CEO, filed five separate Form 4 purchases totaling $12.4 million. Score 585 — our highest conviction rating. The stock opened up 2% on the signal.
No congressional overlap on AUPH today. But the infrastructure that would catch it — if it existed — is running.
That's the compound signal. When a corporate insider with $12M of conviction and a committee member with regulatory visibility both move on the same ticker, the probability of a meaningful price move increases substantially. We've documented 28 such compound signals in our historical dataset. The pattern holds.
What This Means for 2028
The 2028 election cycle will generate an estimated $10–50 billion in prediction market volume. Congressional trading disclosures will continue flowing. Insider filings will continue flowing.
The question isn't whether information asymmetry exists in these markets. The question is whether that asymmetry can be captured — through faster, more systematic processing of public data than the market has managed to price in.
We believe it can. We've built the infrastructure to test that belief in real time.
The Infrastructure
- Live signal feed: api.greenwood.financial
- Congressional data: $0.004/query
- Compound signals: $0.010/query
- Full methodology: greenwood.financial
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