Overview
Political Alpha tracks stock and asset trades disclosed by politicians across 18 countries. It surfaces congressional trading activity (US House and Senate), UK Parliament registers of interests, EU member state filings, Australian registers, and more. Each filing is parsed, normalized, and scored so you can separate noise from edge in seconds.
Politicians sit on committees that shape policy for the industries they can legally trade. When a Senate Finance Committee member buys semiconductor exposure days before a major subsidy vote, that's the kind of signal Political Alpha is built to surface.
What it is
A real-time dashboard and alert engine built on publicly disclosed trade filings from government bodies. Every trade includes:
- Politician (name, country, party, chamber, committees)
- Ticker and asset type (stock, ETF, crypto, option, bond)
- Direction (BUY, SELL, OPTION, EXCHANGE)
- Amount range (most filings disclose a range, e.g. $50K-$100K)
- Filing lag (how long the politician took to disclose after the trade)
- Signal score 0-100 (see below)
How to access
Open /political-alpha from the main nav. The dashboard defaults to the last 30 days of filings sorted by signal score, so the loudest trades are at the top on first load.
Key features
Global coverage
- United States - House and Senate (STOCK Act filings)
- United Kingdom - Commons and Lords registers of interests
- European Union - Parliament and member-state filings (DE, FR, IT, ES, NL, PL, SE)
- Australia - Statement of Registrable Interests
- Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Brazil
Signal scoring (0-100)
Every trade receives a composite score built from five weighted factors:
- Committee relevance - does the politician sit on a committee that oversees the ticker's sector?
- Cluster detection - how many other politicians bought or sold the same ticker inside a 7-day window?
- Trade size - larger disclosed ranges weight higher
- Track record - the politician's historical post-trade returns versus SPY
- Reporting speed - late disclosures (a common red flag) increase the score, not decrease it
Follow-list
Pin any politician to your follow-list to isolate their activity. The follow-list view strips out everyone else and charts the pinned names' trade history, holdings drift, and performance over time.
Alert rules
Build custom alert profiles with AND/OR logic. Common profiles:
- Any trade by a specific politician
- Any trade on a specific ticker above $50K
- Cluster buys where 3+ politicians take the same position within 48 hours
- Any trade with signal score above 80
- Trades by committee members on tickers their committee oversees
Backtest
Every politician, ticker, and alert profile has a backtest tab showing what a portfolio would have returned if it mirrored those trades on disclosure date. Use this to filter out politicians with below-benchmark records before you start following them.
Step-by-step: create your first alert
- Open /political-alpha. The main feed loads with the last 30 days of filings sorted by signal score descending.
- Pick a seed politician. Click the Leaderboard tab, sort by "Return vs SPY (1Y)", and identify a name with a consistent positive track record. Click their name to open the detail page.
- Review their trade history. Check the cumulative return chart against SPY. Scroll through past trades and confirm the pattern makes sense (sector concentration, trade sizes, hit rate).
- Click "Follow". This pins them to your follow-list and makes their next filing easier to surface.
- Open the Alerts tab from the same detail page, then click "Create alert rule".
- Configure the rule. Set: Politician = [name]. Direction = BUY. Min trade size = $15K. Delivery = Email + Telegram.
- Set the signal-score floor. Add a second condition: Signal score >= 60. This filters out housekeeping trades (dividend reinvestments, spousal index-fund rebalances) and keeps only meaningful activity.
- Name the rule and save. Something like "[Name] BUYs >$15K, score 60+". You can disable or edit it from /alerts.
- Test. Click "Preview matches (last 90d)" to see how many trades would have triggered the alert in the past quarter. Tune the score floor and size until you see 2-4 matches per month - signal without spam.
- Wire the webhook (optional). If you want alerts to flow into your own trade-execution pipeline, paste a webhook URL in the Delivery section. Alerts POST JSON with full trade metadata.
Cluster alerts - the highest-conviction signal
Single politician trades are noisy. Clusters (multiple politicians taking the same position in a narrow window) are where the real edge lives. Create a cluster rule:
- Min cluster size: 3 politicians
- Window: 48 hours
- Same direction (all BUY or all SELL)
- Same ticker or same ETF
Cluster alerts are rare by design - expect 1-3 per month on the US feed. When they fire, they carry the highest historical hit rate in the system.
Tips
- Late filings are often the most interesting. A trade disclosed 60 days after execution is more likely to have been held for a reason than one disclosed on day 1.
- Cross-reference the Committees column. A banking committee chair buying bank stocks before a vote on capital requirements is exactly the kind of asymmetric trade the system is built to surface.
- Spouse and dependent trades are often the real signal. Many politicians route disclosures through family members to soften optics; Political Alpha treats them identically to direct filings.
- Use the 18-country filter to find under-monitored geographies. EU member-state disclosures get a fraction of the attention US congressional trades do.
- Combine Political Alpha with Insider Alpha. When politicians and corporate insiders buy the same ticker in the same month, the signal compounds.