Senate Investments

Context

The STOCK Act (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge) was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2012. This law prevents insider trading by members of Congress and other government employees that may have access to non-public information. As a result, every Senator is required to publicly file any transaction of stock, bond, commodities futures, and other securities within 45 days.

Disclosures can be found here: https://efdsearch.senate.gov/

Data was collected using a Python script with the Selenium and Pandas modules. The program accessed the site and scrolled through all electronically submitted disclosures, adding each to a data frame.

Content

The data set contains 9 columns:

1. Name - Which Senator the transaction is 'related' to
2. Transaction Date - Date of transaction
3. Owner - Who completed the transaction
4. Ticker - Stock/ Security Ticker (if applicable)
5. Asset Name - Name of asset
6. Asset Type - Category of asset
7. Type - Type of transaction
8. Amount - USD Amount of trade broken up into 5 categories.
9. Comment

Important Data Disclosures

It's important to note that I wasn't able to scrape data that was physically submitted, meaning some Senators submit handwritten documents to disclose trades. I arranged my code to skip over these documents because I simply lack the knowledge to scrape handwriting with Python.

Inspiration

I'd love to see how Senators' investment returns compare to those of 'normal' people. I plan on running my script again to scrape additional government employee investments to see how they compare!