Methodology
Conviction Score v2.0 — September 2026
What the Conviction Score Measures
The Conviction Score quantifies the statistical likelihood that a disclosed financial trade co-occurs with known conflict-of-interest indicators. It does not allege wrongdoing. It quantifies evidence.
Each trade filed by a member of Congress is evaluated against eight independent evidence features. When multiple features fire simultaneously, a convergence multiplier amplifies the score — because breadth of evidence matters more than depth of any single indicator.
The Eight Evidence Features
| Feature | Weight | What It Measures |
|---|---|---|
| Committee Jurisdiction | 25 | Does the trader sit on a committee that regulates, funds, or oversees the sector or company they traded? |
| PAC Contribution Alignment | 15 | Has the traded company, its industry group, or its lobbyists contributed to the trader's campaign or leadership PAC? |
| Lobbying Density | 12 | How heavily does the traded company or sector lobby the committees the trader sits on? |
| Bill Timing Correlation | 12 | Was the trade made within a statistically significant window before or after legislation affecting the traded asset? |
| Trade Size Anomaly | 10 | Is this trade unusually large relative to the trader's historical pattern? |
| Herd Signal | 8 | Are multiple members with overlapping committee access trading the same asset in the same direction within a narrow window? |
| Revolving Door | 8 | Does the trader have employment, advisory, or board relationships with the traded company or its sector? |
| Track Record | 5 | Has this trader historically shown abnormal returns on trades that scored high on the other seven features? |
The Convergence Multiplier
Individual features are suggestive. Convergence is damning. When multiple features fire simultaneously on a single trade, the probability that the pattern is coincidental drops sharply.
The Tiers
Each tier describes the algorithm's confidence about the data pattern, not the person. The progression implies less luck and more information advantage at each step.
Legal Safe Harbor
Conviction Scores describe statistical patterns in publicly available disclosure data. They measure the degree to which disclosed trades co-occur with documented conflict-of-interest indicators. Tier labels describe signal strength, not intent or legality. Capitol Gains makes no allegations of wrongdoing, insider trading, or violations of the STOCK Act or any other law. All source filings are linked from every scored trade.
Data Sources
All data used in Conviction Score calculations comes from public government sources:
Version History
v2.1 — September 18, 2026
Data integrity remediation: four of the eight evidence features (Bill Timing Correlation, Lobbying Density, Revolving Door, PAC Contribution Alignment) were scoring zero for every trade due to ingestion and API-mapping bugs unrelated to the weighting formula — each was reading a field that did not exist in the source API's actual response shape. All four are fixed and verified against live data; historical lobbying records were corrected in place from their preserved raw filings. Committee Jurisdiction, Trade Size Anomaly, and Herd Signal were unaffected throughout. Track Record remains at zero by design until enough phantom positions have closed to establish a baseline — this is expected behavior, not a defect.
v2.0 — September 2026
Scoring system renamed from CCS (Conflict-Convergence Score) to Conviction Score. Tier labels updated from letter grades (S/A/B/C/D) to descriptive labels (Convicted/Convinced/Correlated/Lucky/Average). Tier thresholds adjusted: Convicted 90+, Convinced 70+, Correlated 40+, Lucky 15+.