Though this article makes some good points: - There's always an excuse: someone else made the trade, or it was just really lucky, or it was smart use of public information. - There are ways for members of congress to influence the markets that disclosures under the STOCK act won't prevent; e.g. many members of congress trade tech stocks and hold hearings about big tech companies, which can move the markets. - Trading related to one's congressional duties could be insider trading...or it could be trading on the basis of subject matter expertise. It's not always easy to tell them apart. - Compliance to the STOCK act isn't great, so the data are incomplete. - The data are presented in difficult-to-use form. If not for https://senatestockwatcher.com/, we'd be looking at a hard-to-navigate site full of scanned PDFs. Converting those to usable data is probably something the government should be doing!