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2026-W29 IBM

Josh Gottheimer IBM: a high composite, a low ML head, and the question they don't both answer

72.1 Elevated ML: Diverged

Headline correlation

Josh Gottheimer (D-New Jersey), IBM (International Business Machines Corporation)

Composite score: 72.1 / 100 (medium tier)

Transactionsale_partial, $1,001 - $15,000, 2026-07-16
Disclosure2026-08-10 (25 day lag)
SectorInformation Technology to IT Consulting & Other Services
CommitteesHouse Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
ML annotationML heads diverge: distill 90.6, forward-CAR 62.0. The two model estimates disagree, and the gap is the story; see methodology. Both are model scores, not realized returns. Measured abnormal returns vs SPY are reported separately in the returns row.

A note on the label: 2026-W29 is the ISO week of the headline trade itself. Each issue covers correlations from the trailing week of disclosures, which can surface trades executed weeks earlier.

What the engine saw. The trade involving Josh Gottheimer’s partial sale of IBM shares on 2026-07-16 was flagged due to a high correlation score of 72.1, driven by proximity to a key event (26.3 points), potential committee overlap in the technology sector (18.4 points), and a pre-event trade activity (15.8 points). The lobbying context, which includes IT-focused firms targeting defense-related entities, aligns with IBM’s sector, suggesting possible indirect connections to the trade’s timing and context.

Supporting signals.

  • Bill (score 72.1, 2026-07-16): To name the Department of Veterans Affairs community-based outpatient clinic in Newton, New Jersey, as the “Anthony “Tony” J. Gallopo VA Clinic”.
  • Bill (score 72.1, 2026-07-16): Protecting America’s Food Supply Act of 2026
  • Bill (score 64.4, 2026-07-21): FDA Modernization Act 3.0

SHAP top features. timing_raw (+7.454), jurisdiction_raw (+4.986), trade_before_event_raw (+1.324)

Abnormal returns vs SPY. n/a (7d) / +4.3% (30d) / n/a (90d)

Why this one matters

Start with the filing behind the headline, because its shape matters more than any single line. The August 10 report is thirteen transactions, every one jointly owned, every one $1,001 to $15,000, every one inside a single Morgan Stanley managed account. Gottheimer appears in this dataset more than any other member, he is the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee’s NSA and Cyber subcommittee, and his office’s standing position (on record with Forbes in December) is that a third party holds full investment discretion and that a blind trust is awaiting approval. Inside that account, the July cluster is a rotation, not a bloc of sales: IBM out over July 15 and 16 (the second sale closed the position), with CrowdStrike bought July 15, Palo Alto Networks bought July 16, and SailPoint bought July 20. The runner-up rows above do not show direction, so it is worth saying plainly that PANW and CRWD were purchases.

The tape explains that rotation better than the committee calendar does. On July 14, IBM pre-announced weak second-quarter results and fell 25.2 percent, its worst trading day in decades; the same session, CrowdStrike rose 11 percent and Palo Alto 7 percent as money rotated into cybersecurity. The account sold IBM the day after and two days after that crash, near the post-crash low, and bought the names that had already popped. That is a reaction to public news, not a move ahead of it, and the realized numbers make the same point: the IBM pair’s 30-day abnormal return is +4.3 percent against SPY, meaning IBM outperformed the market after the sale (it was back near $237 by mid-August, above the sale-window price). Selling a bottom that recovers is the opposite of an informed exit. The supporting bills above deserve the same honesty: the FDA Modernization Act and a food-supply bill are health measures Gottheimer cosponsors, with no information-technology content at all. They are sector-adjacency matches, and the engine’s timing factor is leaning on them.

What keeps this on the watchlist is the event the engine did not match. Four days after the cyber purchases, on July 20, his committee marked up the FY2027 Intelligence Authorization Act in closed session, a bill whose cyber provisions include codifying and expanding NSA’s AI Security Center and widening intelligence-community access to frontier AI models for cyber operations. Buying three cybersecurity names the week before a closed, cyber-heavy markup you will sit in is exactly the correlation this engine exists to log, even when, as here, the more economical explanation is an advisor chasing a rotation that played out on live television. Full discretion is a claim we can test over time: it predicts that this account’s moves will keep trailing public tape events, the way these did, rather than landing ahead of closed-session ones. If that pattern flips, the story changes. And the cleanest resolution is the one his office says is already in motion; a blind trust approved and funded would end the question. Until then, we score what the filings let us see.

Sources

Facts in this section that come from outside the engine’s dataset:

Runner-ups this week

  • Josh Gottheimer (D) to PANW (Information Technology): score 72.1, traded 2026-07-16
  • Josh Gottheimer (D) to IBM (Information Technology): score 72.1, traded 2026-07-15
  • Josh Gottheimer (D) to CRWD (Information Technology): score 72.1, traded 2026-07-15
  • John J Mr Mcguire Iii (R) to BLK (Financials): score 70.3, traded 2026-07-14
  • Mike Kelly (R) to ABT (Health Care): score 65.7, traded 2026-07-17

Newcomers we’re watching

Members with under 5 total trade disclosures get listed but not scored; we want enough history to compare against before reading signal into their patterns. This week’s newcomers we’re watching:

  • Sam T. Liccardo (D): 1 lifetime trade(s); most recent: NVDA on 2026-07-21
  • Christian D. Menefee (D): 2 lifetime trade(s); most recent: PINS on 2026-08-07
  • Pete Sessions (R): 2 lifetime trade(s); most recent: ARCC on 2026-07-24
  • James A. Himes (D): 3 lifetime trade(s); most recent: XOM on 2026-07-20
  • Robert E. Latta (R): 4 lifetime trade(s); most recent: FMAO on 2026-07-20
  • Kelly Louise Morrison (D): 4 lifetime trade(s); most recent: HONAV on 2026-06-29

This week in the dataset

  • 42 new trade disclosures ingested
  • 902 new bill records
  • 152 new lobbying filings
  • 4,360 new correlations scored
  • Top composite score this week: 82.6

Source: public records (QuiverQuant trades, USAspending contracts, Congress.gov bills, lda.gov lobbying). Published under CC0. See the full methodology for the scoring formula, and the supporting data for replication inputs.

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