We believe public servants' financial conflicts of interest should be easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to quantify.
Capitol Gains exists to make that math accessible. We run statistical tests on public data. We publish the results. What you do with those results is your business.
“Capitol Gains publishes the results of statistical calculations performed on public government filings. Interest Points is a mathematical measure of the gap between a politician's general trading performance and their performance in sectors they regulate. What you do with that number is your business.”
What we are
A data publisher, in the same tradition as Bloomberg, Refinitiv, and Morningstar. A transparency platform, in the same tradition as ProPublica, OpenSecrets, and the Sunlight Foundation. A statistical analysis engine, applied to a specific question: does a politician's trading performance correlate with the industries they have power over?
Under the STOCK Act, members of Congress are required to disclose their trades publicly. That data has always existed. What's been missing is a rigorous, consistent, algorithmic way to score it — not by asking whether a single trade looks suspicious, but by measuring, across tens of thousands of trades, whether the pattern holds up.
What we are not
We are not a registered investment adviser. We are not a broker-dealer. We are not a financial planner or fiduciary. We do not manage money, execute trades, or solicit securities transactions. We do not tell you what to buy or sell. We publish numbers derived from public filings and let you draw your own conclusions.
How we score
Every disclosed trade gets a Conviction Score built from indicators like trade size relative to a politician's norm, whether multiple lawmakers traded the same stock in the same window, committee jurisdiction over the traded company's industry, and lobbying activity tied to that company. We also calculate two “luck scores” per politician — how their overall returns compare to random chance, and how their returns in conflict-flagged sectors specifically compare. The gap between those two numbers is what we call Interest Points. Full methodology, including academic citations, is at /methodology.
Why it matters
Public trust in institutions depends partly on whether people believe the rules apply equally. Congressional stock trading disclosure exists because lawmakers write and vote on the regulations that move markets. When the data is scattered across PDFs and disclosure forms, that transparency is theoretical. We make it legible.