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Congressional disclosures

How to build a trading strategy with congressional disclosures

Build a congressional-disclosure strategy step by step, worked through a real backtest against SPY: Copy Nancy Pelosi's disclosed purchases.

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Copy Nancy Pelosi's disclosed purchases

Value (%)

Copy Nancy Pelosi's disclosed purchases against SPY, percent from the first day, Oct 2021 – Sep 202690.5%-35.3%2021-10-012026-09-30
Strategy 2026-09-30
77.36%
SPY 2026-09-30
88.51%
StrategySPYHistorical simulation
Test window
Oct 2021 – Sep 2026
Starting balance
$100,000
Fee per trade
0.1%
Benchmark
SPY

This is the result. The four steps below show how the strategy was built and tested.

1. Describe the idea to Aurora

A prompt like this one describes the strategy in plain English.

“Build a portfolio that follows these rules. Universe: all U.S. stocks. Keep stocks Nancy Pelosi disclosed buying (stocks or options) in the last 90 days. Weight each position by the high end of her disclosed purchase dollars over those 90 days. Rebalance every trading session. Backtest it between Oct 1, 2021 and Sep 30, 2026 with $100,000 to start, a 0.1% fee on each trade, SPY as the benchmark.”

2. Check the rules Aurora writes

These are the exact rules the backtest ran.

  1. Rule 1

    Universe: all U.S. stocks.

  2. Rule 2

    Keep stocks Nancy Pelosi disclosed buying (stocks or options) in the last 90 days.

  3. Rule 3

    Weight each position by the high end of her disclosed purchase dollars over those 90 days.

  4. Rule 4

    Rebalance every trading session.

3. Backtest it against SPY after fees

It held only 21 stocks over five years, so the 59.8% fall is the cost of that concentration.

Strategy return
+77.4%
SPY return
+88.5%
Largest fall
−59.8%
Sharpe ratio
0.49
Closed trades
2,469
Fees paid
$4,997

4. Test it on dates it never saw

A walk-forward test runs the frozen rules on later dates they never saw. See the same rules tested on dates they never saw

Aurora's research on this strategy is public. Read the Aurora research run

The results describe historical observations. They do not establish live trading performance.

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