Apify Congress Trading Tracker

Congress Trading Tracker: Monitor New Disclosures Over Time

Turn US Congressional financial disclosures into a tracker. Define what to watch (one member, one ticker, or all recent activity), poll on a schedule, keep only rows you have not seen, and deliver the new filings to an alert, a table, or a dashboard. Every row is a parsed House or Senate Periodic Transaction Report (PTR) line with the member, chamber, asset, transaction type, amount bracket, and filing IDs.

When to use this skill

• The user wants a congress trading tracker or asks to track congressional stock trades over time.
• They want to monitor one member's disclosures, or every member's activity in one ticker.
• They want alerts, a digest, or a database of newly filed trades.
• A compliance or ESG team wants to monitor disclosed congressional trades against holdings they oversee, as an auditable history.
• A journalist or researcher wants filings around a legislative event collected as they publish.

Not for: one-off historical pulls (use the congress-stock-trades-api skill), real-time signals (filings trail trades by 30 to 45 days by law), or investment recommendations (this is public-records monitoring, not advice).

What each poll returns (one row per transaction)

id (stable row identifier, the dedupe key), First_Name, Last_Name, House (House or Senate), State_District, Ticker (blank when the asset is not publicly listed), Asset, Asset_Type_Code, Transaction_Type (P, S, S (partial), E), Amount_Range (the filed bracket), Date (transaction date), Notification_Date (the freshness signal), Year, Details (when present), Capital_Gains_Over_200 (often blank), Filing_ID, DocID, PDF_Quality, created_at, plus a search_metadata object echoing the query for audit trails.

Prerequisites

• Apify account (sign up at https://apify.com?fpr=9n7kx3&fp_sid=skillrepo).
• Authentication via apify login, or an APIFY_TOKEN environment variable (Apify Console, Settings, Integrations).

The Actor

• Store page: https://apify.com/johnvc/us-congress-financial-disclosures-and-stock-trading-data?fpr=9n7kx3&fp_sid=skillrepo
• Actor ID: johnvc/us-congress-financial-disclosures-and-stock-trading-data
• Pricing: pay per transaction returned, plus a small per-run start fee (see references/gotchas.md).

Run it with the Apify CLI

One tracker poll, watching a single member:

apify actors call "johnvc/us-congress-financial-disclosures-and-stock-trading-data" -i '{"Last_Name":"Pelosi","Max_Results":25}' \
  --json \
  --user-agent apify-awesome-skills/apify-congress-trading-tracker \
  2>/dev/null

A ticker watch across all of Congress:

apify actors call "johnvc/us-congress-financial-disclosures-and-stock-trading-data" -i '{"Stock_Symbol":"NVDA","Max_Results":50}' \
  --json \
  --user-agent apify-awesome-skills/apify-congress-trading-tracker \
  2>/dev/null

Read a finished run's rows later, for example from a scheduled run:

apify datasets get-items <DATASET_ID> --format json --user-agent apify-awesome-skills/apify-congress-trading-tracker 2>/dev/null

Every call carries the three flags this repo expects: --json (or --format json), --user-agent apify-awesome-skills/apify-congress-trading-tracker, and 2>/dev/null.

Run it from Claude or another AI agent (MCP)

The Actor is MCP-ready. Add the hosted server URL:

https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=actors,docs,johnvc/us-congress-financial-disclosures-and-stock-trading-data

Then ask, for example: "Check for new Congress trades in NVDA since last week and summarize who filed what." MCP setup docs: https://docs.apify.com/platform/integrations/mcp

Workflow

1. Define the watch. One Actor input per tracker: a member (First_Name plus Last_Name), a ticker (Stock_Symbol), or nothing for all recent activity across both chambers.
2. Bound each poll. Keep Max_Results at 25 to 50 per poll; a watch rarely produces more new filings than that between polls, and it is the hard cost cap.
3. Pick the cadence. Daily fits the filing pace; PTRs are due 30 to 45 days after the trade, so hourly polling buys nothing. Wrap the input in an Apify Schedule or a cron job.
4. Dedupe. Store seen id values and keep only new rows each poll. Sort new rows by Notification_Date to lead with the freshest filings.
5. Deliver. Send new rows to an alert (email, Slack), append them to a database so history accumulates, or refresh a dashboard. For compliance and ESG monitoring, keep Filing_ID and search_metadata with each stored row so every entry traces to a source filing.

Inputs

• First_Name and Last_Name (string): member watch, case-insensitive partial match
• Stock_Symbol (string): ticker watch, for example NVDA, partial match
• Start_Date and End_Date (string, YYYY-MM-DD): optional window, useful for backfilling a new tracker
• Max_Results (integer, 1 to 1000, default 100): per-poll cap, keep small for trackers

Cost

Billing is per transaction returned plus a small per-run start fee, so a bounded poll is cheap: a daily 25-row member watch is about $0.05 per poll, around $1.50 per month. A 50-row ticker watch is about $0.10 per poll. Estimate per month before scheduling; live prices are in references/gotchas.md.

Honest limits

• This is a polled tracker over public filings, not a push feed; freshness is your poll interval plus the 30 to 45 day statutory filing lag.
• Amount_Range is a bracket exactly as filed; no exact dollar values exist in the source.
• Ticker is blank for unlisted assets, and Asset_Type_Code carries more codes than the common documented set.
• Rows where PDF_Quality is "image" came from scanned filings via OCR; verify against the source PDF when a number matters.
• The tracker collects and organizes disclosure records. It does not evaluate, recommend, or time trades, and its output is research data, not investment advice.

Troubleshooting

• Nothing new in a poll: normal; members file in bursts. Do not widen the watch just to see activity.
• Duplicate rows across polls: expected; dedupe on id before delivering.
• A trade you read about is missing: the filing deadline is 30 to 45 days; it will appear once filed.
• Backfill looks thin: add Start_Date and End_Date with a higher Max_Results for the initial load, then drop back to small polls.

See references/gotchas.md for cost guardrails and error recovery, and references/actor-index.md for the Actor routing table.

Related financial-data Actors

• Earnings Call Transcript API: https://apify.com/johnvc/earnings-call-transcript-api?fpr=9n7kx3&fp_sid=skillrepo
• Google Finance API: https://apify.com/johnvc/google-finance-api?fpr=9n7kx3&fp_sid=skillrepo
• Google News API: https://apify.com/johnvc/GoogleNewsAPI?fpr=9n7kx3&fp_sid=skillrepo