A Periodic Transaction Report (PTR) is the form a member of Congress files to disclose a securities transaction under the STOCK Act. Each PTR can list one or many transactions. Once you understand the columns, the filings become easy to scan. Here is what each field means.
Filer and owner
The report identifies the filing member and the owner of the asset — often the member themselves, but it may be marked as a spouse ("SP"), a dependent child ("DC"), or jointly held ("JT"). This matters: a large share of disclosed congressional trading is done by spouses, and the law covers those transactions too.
Transaction date vs. notification date
Two dates appear for each trade. The transaction date is when the buy or sell actually happened. The notification date is when the member (or their office) reported it. The gap between them is the disclosure delay; the law allows up to 45 days, and unusually long gaps are worth noting.
Asset and ticker
The asset column names the security — a company's stock, a bond, an ETF, an option, or another holding. Where a public ticker exists we link it to that company's page so you can see every lawmaker who has traded it. Some entries are private funds or assets without a ticker; those cannot be linked to a market symbol.
Transaction type
The type tells you the direction of the trade. The most common values are Purchase (a buy), Sale (a sell), and Exchange. Sales are sometimes further marked as partial or full. On this site we render these as clear buy/sell badges so you do not have to decode the raw form.
Amount — always a range
Instead of an exact dollar figure, filers select a bracket: $1,001–$15,000, $15,001–$50,000, $50,001–$100,000, $100,001–$250,000, and larger tiers up into the millions. This is why the "estimated volume" you see for a politician is exactly that — an estimate derived from these ranges. When comparing lawmakers, treat volume figures as order-of-magnitude signals rather than precise sums.
Putting it together
Read across a single row and you get a plain-English sentence: on the transaction date, this owner bought or sold this asset in this dollar range, and disclosed it on the notification date. Read down a politician's full history and patterns emerge — sectors they favor, how quickly they disclose, and whether activity clusters around particular events. Our politician pages organize all of this automatically.
Related: What is the STOCK Act? · Disclosure deadlines & penalties.