CapitolStockWatch

Inspiration

Public records of congressional stock trading are legally mandated under the STOCK Act, yet finding and analyzing this data remains frustratingly difficult. Most existing commercial platforms gate political trade data behind hefty recurring subscriptions, while official government portals rely on unindexed, fragmented, and hard-to-read disclosures. CapitolStockWatch was built to make this public-interest data genuinely transparent, modern, and accessible to retail investors and everyday citizens for free.

What it does

CapitolStockWatch is a financial dashboard that tracks, visualizes, and monitors stock trading activity across both chambers of the U.S. Congress.

Key capabilities include:

• Aggregating real-time transaction reports filed by U.S. Senators and Representatives.
• Tracking ticker-level consensus sentiment, highlighting whether politicians are net buyers or sellers for specific stocks.
• Surfacing portfolio histories and individual trading records by member.
• Flagging statutory compliance metrics, such as identifying disclosures submitted past the mandatory 45-day filing window.

How I built it

The project is built as a lightweight, performant single-page application:

• Frontend: Built with React and modern component styling to ensure low-latency filtering, sorting, and data visualization across devices.
• Data Ingestion: Automated backend pipelines fetch, clean, and normalize disparate regulatory filings from government data sources on a scheduled basis.
• Hosting & Infrastructure: Deployed globally using Vercel and Cloudflare DNS to ensure edge delivery, fast page loads, and zero-cost hosting scalability.

Challenges I ran into

The primary technical hurdle was data hygiene and normalization. Congressional filings arrive with inconsistent formatting, varying ticker naming conventions, periodic amendments, and ambiguous asset disclosures. Handling these edge cases required writing custom validation rules and normalization logic to ensure buy/sell classifications, ticker mappings, and filing-date calculations remained accurate without breaking automated ingestion runs.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

• Successfully architecting an end-to-end automated pipeline that keeps political transaction records fresh without manual entry.
• Designing a clean, uncluttered user interface that makes complex legislative trading records easy to filter and understand in seconds.
• Keeping the entire stack 100% free for end users while operating on an efficient, serverless architecture.

What I learned

Building CapitolStockWatch provided deep hands-on experience in dealing with non-standard government disclosure feeds, structuring data for real-time frontend search and filtering, and setting up automated edge pipelines that handle daily batch processing reliably without server overhead.

What's next for CapitolStockWatch

• Adding automated email and instant alerts for high-conviction trades by top congressional committees.
• Providing downloadable CSV and historical data exports for independent researchers and algorithmic traders.
• Introducing deeper visual analytics, such as historical win rates and sector-allocation breakdowns across congressional leadership.

Built With

• cloudflare
• react
• tailwind-css
• typescript