How to Read a Congressional Stock Trade Disclosure (PTR), Line by Line

Every stock trade you read about in a "Congress bought this" headline started as a Periodic Transaction Report, or PTR: a form filed with the Clerk of the House or the Secretary of the Senate. The headline compresses it into a name, a ticker, and a rough dollar figure. The form itself carries more than that, and several of the extra fields change how much weight a given trade deserves.

This guide walks through a House PTR the way it is actually laid out, so you can open any filing on the House Clerk's disclosure site and read it yourself. Senate filings use a different format, an HTML table on the Senate's eFD site, but the same concepts apply.

The Header: Who Filed, and When

The top of the filing gives the filer's name, status (usually "Member"), and state and district. At the bottom of each page you'll see a Filing ID number. That ID is the filing's permanent address: the PDF lives at a URL ending in that number, and it's the best way to cite or re-find a specific disclosure.

One thing the header does not tell you is whose trades follow. A PTR covers the member, the member's spouse, and dependent children. Which of those a given row belongs to is shown in the first column of the table.

The Columns

The transaction table has the same columns on every page, repeated at the top of each one:

Column	What it means
ID	A row identifier. Some filings number their rows, others leave it blank.
Owner	Whose trade it is. Blank means the member. SP is a spouse, DC a dependent child, JT joint ownership.
Asset	The security's name, followed by its ticker in parentheses and an asset-type tag in brackets.
Transaction Type	P for purchase, S for sale, S (partial) for a partial sale, E for exchange.
Date	The date the transaction happened.
Notification Date	The date the member was notified of the transaction.
Amount	A dollar range, not an exact figure.
Cap. Gains > $200?	A checkbox for whether the sale produced capital gains over $200.

Each of these has a wrinkle worth knowing.

Owner Codes: The Most Misread Column

The owner column is the single biggest source of mistaken headlines. A row marked SP is the spouse's trade. A blank owner is the member's own. Because spouses often manage their own brokerage accounts, a large share of a household's PTR activity can have nothing to do with the member's day-to-day decisions.

That doesn't mean spousal trades are irrelevant. Household finances are shared, and a trade that lines up suspiciously with a committee's agenda is worth noticing whoever placed it. It means the owner code is the first thing to read before you decide what a trade implies. For the broader picture of how this shapes activity counts, see which members of Congress trade stocks the most.

The Asset Name and Its Tags

The asset line looks like Apple Inc. - Common Stock (AAPL) [ST]. The ticker in parentheses is the part most readers go straight to. The bracketed code after it describes the type of asset. Common ones are [ST] for a stock and [OP] for an option. The House publishes a full list of asset type codes.

Two practical cautions:

• Not every row has a clean ticker. Bonds, private holdings, and some foreign shares have none, or carry an exchange code in a description line instead. A row without a ticker isn't necessarily an error.
• The asset name can wrap onto several lines. Long names such as depositary shares and exchange-traded funds are split across lines in the PDF. That's presentation, not two separate assets.

Transaction Type: Purchase, Sale, Partial Sale, Exchange

P and S are straightforward. S (partial) means the holder sold part of a position and kept the rest, which is why a partial sale tells you less than a full exit. E is an exchange, where one holding was swapped for another, often a corporate action or a fund-to-fund move. Exchanges are usually the least informative rows in a filing.

A subtle point: a sale is not the mirror image of a purchase in terms of what it signals. People sell for reasons that have nothing to do with the stock: taxes, a house down payment, rebalancing. We make the same argument for corporate insiders in insider buying versus insider selling.

Two Dates, Two Clocks

Each row has a transaction date and a notification date, and they matter because of how the STOCK Act sets the deadline. Members must report within 30 days of being notified of a transaction, and no later than 45 days after it happened. Both clocks are running, and the filing is due by whichever lands first.

The practical consequence is that a trade can reach the public a month and a half after it was made. The transaction date is when the trade happened; the filing date is when you could first have known about it. If you're studying whether a trade preceded news, measure from the transaction date. If you're asking whether you could have acted on it, measure from the filing date.

Amount Ranges, Not Amounts

Members don't report exact dollar values. They check a range, and the lowest bands are narrow while the highest are enormous:

• $1,001 – $15,000
• $15,001 – $50,000
• $50,001 – $100,000
• $100,001 – $250,000
• $250,001 – $500,000
• $500,001 – $1,000,000
• $1,000,001 – $5,000,000, with larger bands above that for some categories

The top of a wide band can be a hundred times the bottom of it, so adding up ranges gives you an order of magnitude, not a total. A fair way to handle this is to treat each row as "at least the low end" and avoid headline figures built from midpoints.

Ranges also sometimes wrap across lines, and across page breaks. If you ever see an amount that seems to end in a dash, the rest is on the next line or page.

The Lines Under Each Row

Beneath each transaction, the PDF prints a few small labeled lines. They are easy to skip and they carry real information.

Filing status. Usually "New". It can also read "Amended", which means this row corrects an earlier filing. If you're comparing filings, an amended row replaces the one it corrects, so don't count both.

Subholding of. This names the account or entity that holds the asset, for example a particular brokerage account, an IRA, or a family trust. It's one of the more useful details on the form: it tells you whether a trade happened in the member's own brokerage account, a retirement account, or an account run by a manager. A trade inside a professionally managed account looks very different from a hand-placed one, and this line is often the only clue.

Location. Normally "US", and it matters mainly for foreign-held assets.

Description. Free text. Filers use it for things like a foreign ticker, or to explain an option contract. For options, this is where the strike price and expiration date live. We cover that in detail in how to read options trades in congressional disclosures.

Why Machine-Reading These Is Harder Than It Looks

If you've ever copied text out of one of these PDFs, you've seen the problem: the metadata lines run straight into the next row, wrapped asset names split mid-phrase, and page breaks sometimes land in the middle of a row. Tools that scrape PTRs have to separate a row's own name from the previous row's trailing account label, and some filings are scanned images with no text to extract at all. That's why different trackers occasionally disagree on small details like a company name, and why it's worth checking the original filing before you rely on a single detail.

A Short Checklist

When you read a PTR, in this order:

1. Who owns it? Member, spouse, child, or joint.
2. What account is it in? Read the subholding line.
3. What is it? Stock, option, or something else, from the tag.
4. Which direction? Purchase, sale, partial sale, or exchange.
5. How big? Read the range as a floor, not a figure.
6. How old is it? Compare the transaction date and filing date.
7. Is it amended? Check the filing status.

Seven questions will tell you more about a trade than the headline does. To practice on real data, the congressional trading tracker lists disclosed trades for every member who has filed, with a link back to the source filing so you can check any row against the original.

Disclosed trades are not recommendations. Reporting is delayed, values are approximate, and a trade alone says nothing about why it was made.

We track House and Senate trade disclosures as they're filed, with a link to each original filing. Free. Drop your email below.

Sources: House Clerk, Financial Disclosure Reports · House asset type codes · Congressional Research Service, Taking Stock of the STOCK Act