Stocks that corporate insiders and Congress are both buying

Two groups of people file disclosures for very different reasons. A company officer buying their own stock on the open market is reporting under SEC Form 4 within two business days. A member of Congress is reporting under the STOCK Act, up to 45 days later. This ranking looks for the companies that appear in both sets of filings — where an executive and a legislator independently put money into the same stock.

The ranking rule is total disclosed purchase value as a percentage of the company's market capitalisation, not the number of buyers. A $2M purchase means something different in a $200M company than in a $200B one, and counting filings alone would put the largest, most-covered companies permanently on top. Ranking by size relative to the company is what surfaces conviction rather than popularity.

Buys only. Sales are not netted off, because an insider sells for reasons that have nothing to do with their view of the company — diversification, tax, a scheduled 10b5-1 plan — while purchases have a narrower set of explanations.

• Corporate insider purchases from SEC Form 4, filtered to open-market buys so option exercises and tax withholding are not counted as conviction.
• Congressional purchases from House and Senate Periodic Transaction Reports.
• Amounts: Congressional filings disclose ranges rather than exact sums, so the dollar figure for those rows is the midpoint of the disclosed range — an estimate, and the reason two stocks with similar totals are not precisely comparable.
• Sector and market capitalisation for context, so a small-cap with one large buy is distinguishable from a mega-cap with many small ones.
• Average performance per stock, measured from each disclosed transaction price to the latest price we hold.

What this ranking is not: a screen of recent activity. It aggregates every qualifying disclosed purchase we hold, so a company bought heavily two years ago can still rank highly. Read the last-activity date alongside the rank. And the average performance figure describes what the filers' own positions did — not what someone acting on the filings could have captured, because the Congressional half of the data became public weeks after the trade. Our methodology page sets out that distinction in full.