The Short Answer
Yes — but only the ones GovGreed scores as A+ tier and above. The question “do politicians beat the market?” has been asked since the landmark 2004 Ziobrowski study found that U.S. senators' stock portfolios outperformed the market by 12% annually. Twenty-two years later, with the STOCK Act forcing public disclosure, we can test the question with real data instead of academic samples.
GovGreed's database contains 189,595 STOCK Act filings from 343 members of Congress across 14 years (2012–2026). We cross-reference every trade against 7 independent intelligence layers — committee assignments, bill timing, campaign contributions, lobbying activity, herd behavior, sector momentum, and technical indicators — to produce a master signal score from 0 to 100.
Overall Congressional Trading Performance
Across all 189,595 trades, the picture is more nuanced than the headlines suggest. The average congressional trade performs roughly in line with the broader market — neither dramatically outperforming nor consistently underperforming. This makes intuitive sense: many trades are routine portfolio management, spousal diversification, or small-dollar positions that have nothing to do with legislative inside knowledge.
The alpha is concentrated. GovGreed's signal engine identifies the subset of trades that carry genuine insider-style conviction — the ones where a committee member buys a stock in a company their committee oversees, right before favorable legislation moves, while their campaign contributors include the same industry. These are the trades that beat the market. The rest is noise.
Out of 343 politicians who have filed at least one trade, GovGreed's signal engine scores only 61 politicians. The filter is intentional: only trades with an amount midpoint of $50,000 or more are scored, because small-dollar trades (the $1,001–$15,000 range) are statistically meaningless for detecting insider-style signals. A $5,000 trade in Microsoft is portfolio noise. A $500,000 trade in a defense contractor by a member of the Armed Services Committee is a signal.
Signal Tier Performance Breakdown
GovGreed assigns every qualifying trade a master signal score (0–100) and a corresponding tier. The tiers are not arbitrary labels — they are empirically validated against actual market outcomes. Here is how each tier performs in our quarterly-deduplicated backtest:
| Tier | Score Range | Win Rate | Avg 30d Return | Assessment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| S | 75+ | ~80%+ | ~+15% | Rare, highest conviction. Perfect storm of all signals converging. |
| A+ | 60–74 | 72.7% | +10.7% | Strong institutional-grade signal. Actionable edge. |
| A | 50–59 | ~62% | +6.5% | Above average. Multiple signals aligning. |
| B | 40–49 | ~55% | +3.2% | Market-rate performance. Some signal, mostly noise. |
| C | 30–39 | ~50% | +0.5% | Coin flip. No meaningful edge detected. |
| D/F | <30 | ~42% | -2.1% | Underperformers. Worse than random. |
The pattern is clear: signal convergence predicts returns. When a politician's trade aligns with committee jurisdiction, bill activity, contribution patterns, and technical momentum, it outperforms. When it doesn't, it underperforms. The signal tiers aren't just categories — they're empirically separable performance buckets.
Congress vs. the S&P 500
The most common benchmark question: do congressional trades beat a simple buy-and-hold of the S&P 500? The answer depends entirely on which trades you're measuring.
vs. S&P 500 over same period
Most trades are market-rate noise
GovGreed calculates excess return for every trade with available price data: the trade's actual 30-day return minus the S&P 500 return over the exact same period. This eliminates bull-market bias — a trade that returns +8% during a month when the S&P also returns +8% has zero excess return.
The A+ tier's +10.7% average 30-day excess return means these trades beat the S&P 500 by 10.7 percentage points on average over 30 days. Annualized, that's an extraordinary edge — the kind of alpha that would put most hedge funds to shame. The fact that it comes from a subset of public STOCK Act filings, scored by an open signal engine, is remarkable.
Committee Members vs. Non-Committee
One of the most powerful predictors of congressional trading performance is whether the politician sits on a committee with oversight jurisdiction over the company they're trading. GovGreed's signal engine captures this through the bill correlation and contribution pattern layers.
The pattern is what you'd expect if committee knowledge matters:
- Members of the Armed Services Committee who trade defense stocks show higher signal scores and better outcomes than members who trade the same stocks without committee overlap.
- Members of the Financial Services Committee trading bank stocks before regulatory announcements show elevated bill correlation scores.
- Members of the Energy and Commerce Committee trading energy and healthcare stocks show significantly higher sector alignment in GovGreed's lobbying pattern layer.
GovGreed tracks 256,112 bill-trade correlations — the timing relationship between when a politician trades and when related legislation moves through their committee. Trades with high bill correlation scores (indicating the trade occurred within a suspicious window of legislative activity) consistently outperform trades with low or no correlation.
excess returns consistently elevated
when committee alignment is absent
This doesn't prove insider trading — GovGreed is a data platform, not a prosecutor. But it does show that the information environment inside congressional committees appears to correlate with trading performance. The signal engine surfaces these patterns so users can evaluate them.
Top Performers (Bipartisan)
Congressional trading outperformance is bipartisan. Both parties have members who rank highly on GovGreed's signal scores, and both parties have members who consistently underperform. The table below shows the top traders by buy win rate (percentage of purchases that beat the S&P 500 over the following 30 days), loaded live from GovGreed's database.
Source: per-politician trade-return aggregates from GovGreed's live database. Win rate = percentage of stock purchases that beat S&P 500 over 30 days. Minimum 20 buy trades required for inclusion. Updated daily.
The Disclosure Delay Problem
The elephant in the room for anyone trying to copy congressional trades: the disclosure gap. Under the STOCK Act, members of Congress have 45 days to disclose a trade. The actual average delay is 49 days, and 23,426 trades (12.5%) were filed even later than that.
This creates a structural information asymmetry. By the time the public learns that a senator bought $500,000 of a defense contractor, the stock may have already moved. GovGreed's backtested win rates measure what the politician earned from trade date to trade date + 30 days — not what a copy-trader would earn from disclosure date forward.
That said, GovGreed's signal engine partially addresses this by scoring trades at the time of disclosure and using freshness labels (FRESH, NEW, RECENT, AGING, STALE) to indicate how much time has passed since the trade was executed. Fresh trades with high signal scores are the most actionable — the alpha window hasn't fully closed yet.
How GovGreed's Signal Engine Works
GovGreed's signal scoring isn't a single model — it's an intelligence fusion engine that combines independent data sources into a composite score. Each input contributes a weighted percentage to the master score, and convergence multipliers amplify trades where multiple inputs agree:
- 20% Politician Quality — Historical trading track record. Win rates, trading styles, options usage, portfolio concentration. 247 politicians scored.
- 20% Herd Signals — 3+ politicians converging on the same stock within a detection window. Currently tracking 31 active herd signals. Multiple insiders buying the same stock is the strongest single predictor.
- 16% Bill Correlation — Timing analysis between trades and legislative activity. 256,112 bill-trade correlations analyzed. Detects trades that occur suspiciously close to favorable committee activity.
- 12% Technical Context — RSI, SMA crossovers, volume surge analysis. Confirms whether the stock's technical picture supports the politician's trade direction.
- 12% Sector Momentum — Congressional buy/sell ratio by sector, combined with sector price momentum. Identifies sectors where insider buying is concentrated.
- 10% Campaign Contributions — 565 contribution patterns mapping campaign donations to subsequent trades in the donor's industry. Follow the money.
- 10% Lobbying Alignment — 2,101 lobbying patterns connecting lobbyist activity to politician trading in the same tickers. Detects influence-to-trade pipelines.
The master score is computed as a weighted sum of all 7 layers, then multiplied by a convergence factor: 1.3x for 3 converging signals, 1.5x for 4, and 2.0x for 5 or more. This multiplicative design means that a trade must light up multiple independent indicators to reach A+ or S tier. A single hot signal alone isn't enough.
The engine runs on 2,790 scored signals across 61 politicians. Only trades with an amount midpoint of $50,000 or more qualify, because small-dollar trades don't carry enough conviction to be statistically meaningful as insider signals.