The columns of a House report
| Column | What it means |
|---|---|
| Owner | Blank for the member, SP for spouse, JT for joint, DC for dependent child. |
| Asset | The name of the security, often followed by its ticker in parentheses and a two-letter type code in brackets. |
| Transaction type | P for purchase, S for sale, S (partial) for a partial sale, E for exchange. |
| Date | The day the trade happened. |
| Notification date | The day the member learned about it. The 30-day clock starts here. |
| Amount | A range, from $1,001 to $15,000 up to over $50,000,000. |
| Cap. gains > $200? | Checked when a sale produced a capital gain above $200. |
Under each line there can be extra notes: F S is the filing status (New or Amended), S O names the account the asset sits in, D is a description, and C is a comment.
The asset type codes
The code in square brackets tells you what was traded. The common ones are ST for stocks (including ADRs), OP for options, EF for exchange-traded funds, ET for exchange-traded notes, GS for government securities and agency debt, CS for corporate bonds and notes, MF for mutual funds and CT for cryptocurrency. The House publishes the full list of codes. WallStPal’s tables show stocks, options and ETFs that have a ticker, and leave the rest in the original report.
Senate reports
The Senate’s electronic reports show the same information in a web table with slightly different labels: Transaction Date, Owner (Self, Spouse, Joint, Child), Ticker, Asset Name, Asset Type, Type (Purchase, Sale (Full), Sale (Partial), Exchange) and Amount.
Reading the amount
The ranges are wide. A purchase listed as $1,001 to $15,000 could be $1,100 or $14,900. When adding up a member’s trading, use the bottom and top of the ranges to get a low and a high estimate, and never treat the middle as the real number. Our tables show the range exactly as filed.
Reading the dates
The gap between the trade date and the filing date tells you how fresh the information is. Most reports arrive two to six weeks after the trade, and our tables show the number of days. Options deserve extra care: an OP line can be a purchase of call options, an exercise or an expiration, and the description line usually says which.
Examples
A range, not a number. Senator Richard Burr’s reports of his and his wife’s sales on February 13, 2020 added up to between $628,000 and $1.7 million across 33 transactions. Even with every report in hand, nobody outside could say whether the total was closer to the bottom or the top. That is how every amount on these reports works.
A real House report from October 2026. A report Representative Cleo Fields filed on October 22, 2026 listed four purchases: three of NVIDIA stock on October 1 and one of Taiwan Semiconductor on October 9, each in the $1,001 to $15,000 range, held in different brokerage accounts named in the S O lines. Three lines for the same stock on the same day are normal when one person buys in several accounts.
Explain it like I’m 13
Think of a periodic transaction report as a receipt that only shows a price range. It says who bought (you, your mom, or both of you), what they bought, the day they bought it and the day they found out about it, and roughly how much it cost, like “between $1,000 and $15,000.”
It never says the exact price. So if two people’s receipts both say “$1,000 to $15,000,” one might have spent $1,000 and the other almost $15,000. Read the ranges as rough sizes, not exact amounts.
Questions about this guide? Pal reads it with you and answers in plain English.
WallStPal explains public filings. Nothing here is investment advice. Editorial policy · Corrections