Home

Welcome to the SenateTrading wiki!

To prevent insider trading offenses, the SEC mandates quiet periods where company officials and those involved with a significant stock event, such as a split or an acquisition, are barred from trading. In addition to SEC mandates, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, implemented after the great financial crisis in 2008, bars companies from allowing these forms of insider trading. Should Senators be above these laws? Complete analysis of potential violations of the STOCK Act by members of the Senate requires compilation of all senators’ trades. These trades are made available from periodic transaction reports. We compiled these reports from sec.gov and the Harvard Dataverse, where the data had been previously collected from the specific data released by Congress and the SEC. In addition to the SEC data, we added S&P 500 data based on the industry sector. Then we grouped each stock on the S&P 500, compiled from the Standard & Poor’s data index. We grouped their industry with the appropriate Senate committee where the company would fall under that Senate committee’s jurisdiction. By doing this, we can directly compare Senate trades as the Senate trades are broken down by stocks that are broken down the same way the senators are grouped. By doing this, we can see how many senators trade stocks that would fall under their committee’s jurisdiction. In this report, we deem trading in committee as insider trading as these elected officials have direct influence of the traded stock company’s industry. We also want to state that the results of this EDA are non-partisan, as this issue was discovered on both sides of the aisle.