About Capitol Signals
Capitol Signals scores congressional stock trades against the legislation, contracts, and lobbying activity connected to each member's committee assignments. The scoring engine ingests public disclosures nightly, cross-references them across five federal data sources, and produces a 0 to 100 composite score for every flagged trade. Editorial briefs unpack the highest-scoring correlations.
Who built this
Capitol Signals is built and maintained by Brian Chaplow, a data scientist and retired Navy veteran. The project started as a capstone-adjacent experiment in correlating public financial disclosures with government activity and grew into a fully automated analytics pipeline.
Why this exists
The STOCK Act of 2012 requires members of Congress to disclose their stock trades within 45 days. Those filings are public, but scattered across multiple systems and difficult to cross-reference with the legislative and procurement activity that could explain suspicious timing. Capitol Signals closes that gap by joining five federal data sources into a single correlation engine that runs every night.
The goal is transparency, not accusation. A high score means multiple public signals aligned in time and topic. It does not prove wrongdoing. The data, the scoring weights, and the methodology are public so that journalists, researchers, and oversight bodies can verify the work and draw their own conclusions. The pipeline source is private while a 2026 audit remediation is completed; the methodology page records every input to a published score in the meantime.
Privacy
This site runs self-hosted, cookie-free analytics (Umami) and first-party security telemetry: a browser fingerprint is recorded per pageview for abuse monitoring, stored first-party, and not shared with anyone. Nothing goes to ad networks or data brokers, and there is no third-party advertising or tracking. The newsletter is double-opt-in through Buttondown and contains no tracking pixels.
Data sources
| Source | Data | Update |
|---|---|---|
| Quiver Quantitative | STOCK Act trade disclosures | Daily |
| Congress.gov API | Bills, committee assignments, member rosters | Weekly |
| USAspending.gov | Federal contract awards | Daily |
| Senate LDA API | Lobbying disclosure filings | Quarterly |
| yfinance | Market prices, sector classification | Daily |
Contact and license
For corrections, methodology questions, or data inquiries: [email protected].
Corrections and retractions: a factual error in a published brief is corrected in place with a dated note; a brief whose headline claim does not survive correction is retracted with the note left in place of the body. Material changes to the scoring method are dated on the methodology page.
Capitol Signals' own outputs (scores, correlation records, member signal scores, editorial briefs, and the methodology) are dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal. No paywall, no registration. That dedication covers only what Capitol Signals created: Congress.gov and USAspending records are public domain, while QuiverQuant and Yahoo Finance data are used under their own terms and are not re-licensed here.
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