Free Intelligence — Field Notes
Apr 28, 2026
Capitol Flows · Two-Week Brief

What Congress bought and sold while we weren't looking.

A timeline of 84 Congressional stock trades disclosed between April 14 and April 28, 2026 — surfaced via PositionTracker alerts. Patterns: one Republican trimmed his entire portfolio; another went on a 21-stock buying spree; a Bitcoin ETF showed up in a spousal account.

Compiled by aletviegas.com Source PositionTracker · Congress Trades Window 14 days · 10 alert emails · 84 trades
84
Trades captured
15+
Members involved
$1M+
Disclosed value (mid)
3
Spouse trades

Two weeks of alert emails arrive, and a pattern starts to form. It is not a single conspiracy or coordinated bet — Congressional trade data rarely is. It is something quieter: a handful of members re-positioning portfolios in mid-March, mostly disclosed late, mostly within the $1k–$50k range, with two outsized exceptions that deserve a second look.

The shape of the window

Subscriptions to PositionTracker began on April 14. The first real alert landed a week later — and only after the service notified subscribers it had fixed a delivery issue and sent a one-time catch-up covering the trades disclosed April 16 and 17. From that point, alerts have been steady: ten emails in seven trading days, ranging from a single trade to twenty-one in a single batch.

What follows is a day-by-day timeline of every alert in the window, the major actors, and the patterns that emerge when you stack them.

Timeline

Tue · Apr 14

Subscription confirmed

PositionTracker confirms the email subscription to Congress Trades alerts. No trade content.

Tue · Apr 21 · 14:07 UTC

14 trades — backlog flush

A "delivery issue" catch-up email covers disclosures from April 16–17. Headliners: $IBIT (iShares Bitcoin Trust) — Sheri Biggs spouse purchase, $100k–$250k; $VZJennifer McClellan sale, $100k–$250k; and a cluster of August Pfluger purchases (DMLP, EPD, UHAL, BRK/B) all at $15k–$50k from a March 13 trade date.

Tue · Apr 21 · 17:00 UTC

7 trades — semis and consumer rotation

Mostly sales. Dwight Evans sells $MU ($15k–$50k); Terri Sewell sells $GEHC and $TPR; Daniel Meuser's spouse sells $NVDA. Cleo Fields goes the other way and buys $TSM. Senator James Banks sells $SBUX.

Wed · Apr 22 · 15:00 UTC

21 trades — the Salazar buying spree

The single biggest day. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) discloses 21 purchases dated March 19–25, 2026, almost all consumer-discretionary and industrial: $GS, $HON, $ULTA, $RH, $URI, $WHR (twice), $NVR, $VG, $PTON. Several land in the $15k–$50k bracket. The mid-March buying suggests a dip-buying response after a market move.

Fri · Apr 24 · 15:00 UTC

1 trade — a small Ohio bank

Robert E. Latta (R-OH) spouse purchases $FMAO (Farmers & Merchants Bancorp), $1k–$15k. Trade date April 20, filed four days later — unusually fast disclosure.

Fri · Apr 24 · 18:00 UTC

15 trades — the McCormick mosaic

Richard McCormick (R-GA) discloses a mixed 15-trade batch from a March 19 trade date: buys in $UNH, $MSFT, $MGK, $HD, $BLK, $ABT; partial sales of $NEE and $ADP; plus a $100k–$250k US Treasury Bill purchase from December 2025 — a four-month-late disclosure.

Fri · Apr 24 · 19:00 UTC

2 trades — McCormick tail

Two more McCormick partial sales: $LHX and $JNJ, both $1k–$15k. Same March 19 trade date as the morning batch.

Mon · Apr 27 · 14:00 UTC

16 trades — Alford trims, Kean exits

Mark Alford (R-MO) discloses what looks like a single-day, broad portfolio trim from March 16: partial sales across $AMZN, $AAPL, $T, $BRK.B, $PYPL, plus three index ETFs (QQQ, DIA, $SPYB). Thomas Kean (R-NJ) discloses February sales of $GOOGL ($15k–$50k) and $WAT.

Tue · Apr 28 · 15:00 UTC

8 trades — re-disclosures and the Latta echo

Mostly an echo of the Alford March-16 trim batch ($AMZN, $PYPL, $AAPL, $T, plus the index ETFs again — likely a corrected filing or duplicate). Latta's spouse $FMAO position re-appears.

The actors

Six members account for the bulk of activity in the window. Their patterns differ enough to be worth separating.

MemberChamberDirectionTradesNotable
Mark Alford (R-MO)HouseSell~10Single-day Mar 16 trim across mega-caps + index ETFs
Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL)HouseBuy21Mar 19–25 buying spree, consumer/industrials
Richard McCormick (R-GA)HouseMostly buy~17$100k–$250k T-bill, MSFT/UNH/HD adds
August Pfluger (R-TX)HouseBuy4Energy/MLPs (DMLP, EPD), $15k–$50k each
Sheri Biggs (R-SC)HouseSpouse buy1$IBIT Bitcoin ETF, $100k–$250k
Jennifer McClellan (D-VA)HouseSell1$VZ, $100k–$250k
Robert E. Latta (R-OH)HouseSpouse buy1Local Ohio bank, fast filing

Three things worth noticing

Patterns from the data

  1. Two simultaneous Republican strategies, opposite directions. On essentially the same week (March 16–25), Mark Alford was unwinding broad market exposure and Maria Salazar was loading up on it. Either is a defensible portfolio move; together they're a reminder not to read "Congress trades" as one signal.
  2. The largest disclosed positions are spousal and concentrated. The biggest single dollar amounts in the window — Sheri Biggs's $100k–$250k $IBIT, McClellan's $100k–$250k $VZ sale, and McCormick's $100k–$250k T-bill — are the ones to watch. The $1k–$15k bracket trades are mostly noise.
  3. The disclosure lag is uneven. Latta filed a spouse purchase four days after the trade. McCormick disclosed a December 2025 T-bill in April 2026 — over four months late. STOCK Act compliance is technically on a 30/45-day clock; in practice the spread is wide.

What this brief is not

This is a timeline of alerts, not a complete picture of Congressional trading. PositionTracker's pipeline missed two days mid-window and surfaced corrections after the fact; the April 28 batch appears to overlap heavily with April 27. Some members (esp. those with active portfolios) generate dozens of trades that net to nearly zero. Treat the patterns above as questions worth asking, not conclusions worth acting on.

"What Congress buys is interesting. What Congress's spouse buys, in size, with a four-day disclosure window, is more interesting."

Methodology

Source: 10 PositionTracker email alerts to alet@velab.org between April 14 and April 28, 2026. Each alert lists 1–21 newly-disclosed Congressional trades with member name, chamber, ticker, transaction type, dollar bracket, trade date, and filing date. Trade counts in this brief are the union of unique (member, ticker, trade-date, type) tuples across all alerts; some duplicates between the April 27 and April 28 batches are noted in the timeline. Dollar totals reflect bracket midpoints and are illustrative, not exact.