Smart Money

A disclosure date is not a transaction date. Members must report a covered transaction within 45 days of it happening, so the two columns routinely differ by weeks. Both are shown, and neither is merged into the other.

Amounts are ranges, and stay ranges. The form asks for a band, not a figure, so a report says something like $1,001 – $15,000 rather than what was actually spent. Materiality shows that band exactly as filed and will never convert it into a single number, because the midpoint of a range is a precision the filer never gave. The one total on this page, on the most-disclosed boards, is a sum of band minimums and says so: at least that much was disclosed, which is a bound the filings support rather than an estimate they don't.

A ticker links to a company only when it is certain. The symbol shown is the one the filer typed. It becomes a link when that symbol and the company name agree; where they do not, it is marked a probable match and left unlinked, because attaching a public official's trade to the wrong company is a worse error than leaving it unattached.

Some reports cannot be read automatically. About one in eight is filed on paper and published as a scan with no machine-readable text. Those are counted above and named beneath the table, with links to the source, rather than being left out silently. A few individual rows are also refused, where a filer typed an exact figure into a column that only accepts ranges.

The two chambers publish differently. The House files a PDF per report, some of them scans; the Senate publishes a table, so its reports are read in full. Senators also hold far more municipal bonds, treasuries and funds, and those have no company page to link to, so a smaller share of their transactions carries a ticker here. That is what they disclosed, not a gap.

Sources: the Clerk of the House financial disclosure archive and the Senate electronic financial disclosure system, both US Government works.