Built by a student.
For everyone.

I’m a student at Riverdale Country School in New York. I’ve followed the markets for as long as I can remember — how capital moves, who has information advantage, and why that gap compounds over time.

In researching congressional trading patterns, I found that members of Congress are legally required to disclose every stock trade they make within 45 days, under a 2012 law called the STOCK Act. The disclosures are public record. The problem is the data is distributed across government PDFs with no search, no aggregation, and no way to spot patterns — effectively inaccessible to anyone without a paid research subscription or significant time to burn.

The information asymmetry bothered me. The data was promised to the public by federal law. It exists. It just wasn’t usable. So I built the infrastructure to make it usable: automated ingestion, a significance scoring system that normalizes each trade against the politician’s net worth, committee cross-referencing, and a clean interface that doesn’t require any technical background to navigate.

CapitolWatch doesn’t take political positions and doesn’t make accusations. It surfaces public disclosures, applies consistent methodology, and lets the data speak. The goal is simple: if this information is legally public, it should be practically public too.

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act — the STOCK Act — was signed into law in 2012. It requires every member of Congress, plus their senior staff, to publicly disclose any stock trade over $1,000 within 45 days of the transaction. The disclosures are filed with the House Clerk or the Senate Office of Public Records.

Importantly, the STOCK Act does notban members of Congress from trading stocks. It only requires that they tell us. The data is public — filings have to be searchable online — but in practice they’re stored as hundreds of thousands of individual PDFs across two separate government websites, with no aggregated database, no API, and no way to compare across members.

That gap is what CapitolWatch closes. The law gave us the right to see this information. Surfacing it in a way people can actually use is the rest of the job.