# How Congress and the President Are Trading Into the 2026 Midterms

> With Election Day set for November 3, 2026, congressional stock trading is running about 60% below 2025's pace, while an account in President Trump's name has disclosed 6,977 transactions this year, more than any sitting president has ever reported. Here is what the filings show and what to watch before and after the vote.

- Source: https://tradercongress.com/blog/2026-midterms-congress-trump-trading-report
- Published: Sep 30, 2026
- Author: TraderCongress Analytics
- Tags: 2026 Midterms, Trump Trades, Congressional Trading, Data Report
- Reading time: 11 min read

## The short answer

Five weeks before the 2026 midterm elections, the two branches of government that must disclose their trades are moving in opposite directions. Members of Congress have disclosed 3,277 stock trades dated January 1 to September 22, 2026, down from 8,627 over the same window in 2025, with fewer members trading each month. An account held in President Trump's name, by contrast, has disclosed 6,977 securities transactions dated January through July 2026 across 2,548 different securities, a volume of reported activity with no precedent for a sitting president.

Both trends unfold against a live policy fight: on July 22, 2026 the House passed the Stop Insider Trading Act by 232 to 198, the first congressional stock trading ban ever to receive a House floor vote, and the Senate has not yet acted. This report sets out the numbers, the calendar that governs what voters can see before they vote, and what to watch between now and the new Congress in January.

## Methodology and sources

- **Congress:** Periodic Transaction Reports filed with the House Clerk and the Secretary of the Senate under the [STOCK Act](https://tradercongress.com/blog/stock-act-guide), as collected and deduplicated in the TraderCongress database. Counts are transactions with the stated transaction dates, filed by September 25, 2026.
- **The President:** Periodic Transaction Reports (OGE Form 278-T) filed with the Office of Government Ethics, which the STOCK Act requires of the President just as it does of members of Congress. TraderCongress ingests these through a licensed data feed; the underlying forms are public, for example the [April 20, 2026 report](https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/President-Donald-J.-Trump-Periodic-Transaction-Report-4.20.26.pdf) posted by the White House.
- **What the filings show and do not show:** ticker, transaction date, filing date, purchase or sale, and an amount range. They do not show prices paid, exact amounts, or the reasons for a trade. Amended filings can revise earlier records.
- **Attribution:** congressional trades by spouses, dependent children and joint accounts are attributed to the filing member, as the law requires. Presidential transactions are attributed to the filer, President Trump; the White House and the Trump Organization have said the President has no role in directing the trades and that the account is managed by a third party.

## The election calendar that shapes what you can see

Election Day is Tuesday, November 3, 2026. All 435 House seats and 33 regularly scheduled Senate seats are on the ballot, plus special Senate elections. Three disclosure dates matter for anyone reading the filings:

1. **September 19, 2026.** The STOCK Act allows 45 days to report a trade. A trade executed after September 19 can legally be disclosed after November 3, so the final weeks of the campaign are, by design, the least transparent.
2. **November 4, 2026 to January 3, 2027.** The lame-duck session. Retiring and defeated members keep every trading right and every disclosure obligation until their terms end, and historically the weeks after an election bring a wave of late filings.
3. **May 15, 2027.** The next annual financial disclosure deadline, when holdings (rather than trades) for calendar 2026 become public for members and, through the OGE Form 278e, for the President.

## Congress: trading has slowed sharply in the election year

| Year (Jan 1 – Sep 22) | Trades disclosed | Members trading | Purchases | Sales |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 2022 (midterm year) | 6,198 | 106 | 3,301 | 2,868 |
| 2023 | 6,172 | 85 | 2,705 | 3,434 |
| 2024 (presidential year) | 4,395 | 92 | 2,225 | 2,115 |
| 2025 | 8,627 | 101 | 4,195 | 4,415 |
| 2026 (midterm year, to date) | 3,277 | 86 | 1,716 | 1,542 |

The 2026 figure will grow as late filings arrive, but the slowdown is not a lag artifact. January through July are essentially complete for both years, and they show 2,952 trades in 2026 against 7,273 in 2025, a decline of about 59%. Even setting aside April 2025, when the tariff sell-off produced the busiest month in the database, 2026 is running roughly 47% below the prior year.

| Month | 2025 trades | 2025 members | 2026 trades | 2026 members |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| January | 948 | 44 | 941 | 35 |
| February | 839 | 43 | 325 | 31 |
| March | 1,067 | 45 | 710 | 33 |
| April | 1,677 | 44 | 221 | 32 |
| May | 923 | 36 | 266 | 34 |
| June | 1,024 | 40 | 228 | 38 |
| July | 795 | 36 | 261 | 30 |
| August | 965 | 34 | 273* | 24* |
| September | 785 | 33 | 52* | 4* |

** Incomplete: trades from August and September 2026 can still be filed within the 45-day window.*

Two things stand out. First, the number of members filing trades in any given month has fallen from the mid-40s in early 2025 to the low 30s in 2026. Second, the drop is broad rather than driven by one or two prolific filers stepping back. The pattern matches what the database shows for 2024, the last election year, when activity also fell below the surrounding years. Members do not have to explain why they trade less, but a floor vote on a ban, a campaign season in which opponents comb through disclosures, and a growing number of members who have pledged not to trade individual stocks all point in the same direction.

## What Congress is buying in 2026

Purchases made by several different members are a more reliable signal than any single filing. These are the stocks bought by the most members between January 1 and September 22, 2026.

| Ticker | Company | Members buying | Purchases |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| MSFT | Microsoft | 12 | 27 |
| NVDA | NVIDIA | 9 | 13 |
| AMZN | Amazon | 8 | 14 |
| AAPL | Apple | 8 | 13 |
| META | Meta Platforms | 8 | 9 |
| UNH | UnitedHealth Group | 8 | 9 |
| MU | Micron Technology | 8 | 9 |
| IBM | IBM | 7 | 10 |
| AMD | Advanced Micro Devices | 6 | 13 |
| NFLX | Netflix | 6 | 7 |
| UBER | Uber Technologies | 6 | 6 |
| PANW | Palo Alto Networks | 5 | 11 |
| AVGO | Broadcom | 5 | 10 |
| GOOGL | Alphabet | 5 | 9 |
| HD | Home Depot | 5 | 9 |

Big Tech and semiconductors dominate the year as a whole, even though the [third quarter](https://tradercongress.com/blog/what-congress-is-buying-q3-2026) saw those same names sold by more members than bought them. UnitedHealth, a company whose stock has been shaped by federal Medicare policy and a federal investigation, drew purchases from eight members, the most of any non-technology name.

## The President: disclosed trading on a scale with no precedent

Presidents have filed financial disclosures since the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, and periodic transaction reports since the STOCK Act extended that requirement to the executive branch in 2012. Reports from the Obama and Biden years listed, at most, a handful of transactions such as Treasury purchases. The 2026 reports filed for President Trump are different in kind.

| Metric | January 2 – July 31, 2026 (filed through September 22) |
| --- | --- |
| Transactions disclosed | 6,977 |
| Purchases | 3,787 (54%) |
| Sales | 3,190 (46%) |
| Distinct securities | 2,548 |
| Transactions over $250,000 | 534 |
| Transactions over $1,000,000 | 135 |
| Transactions of $5,000,001 – $25,000,000 | 8 |
| Share under $50,000 | 71% |

The reports arrived in batches. The first-quarter report, released by the Office of Government Ethics on May 14, 2026, ran to 113 pages and listed 3,642 transactions, a figure Fortune described as an "unusual" level of activity for a presidential brokerage account. A June report listed more than 1,000 transactions. The report posted on September 22 covered July and listed 1,156. In the TraderCongress database, which deduplicates the feed, the monthly pattern looks like this:

| Month (2026) | Transactions | Purchases | Sales |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| January | 663 | 397 | 266 |
| February | 796 | 382 | 414 |
| March | 2,167 | 1,561 | 606 |
| April | none in the filings collected to date |  |  |
| May | 1,144 | 431 | 713 |
| June | 1,051 | 576 | 475 |
| July | 1,156 | 440 | 716 |

March, with 2,167 transactions and 1,561 of them purchases, was the single busiest month. The securities traded most often are large, widely held companies rather than concentrated bets: Microsoft (31 transactions), Home Depot (27), Netflix (27), McDonald's (26), Adobe (22), Intuitive Surgical (21), Uber (21), Procter & Gamble (21), PepsiCo (20) and Abbott Laboratories (20) lead the list, followed by NVIDIA, Amazon, Verizon, Intuit, Copart, ServiceNow, AT&T, Fiserv, Salesforce, UnitedHealth, Tesla, IBM, S&P Global and Tyler Technologies. The breadth, the balance of buys and sells, and the concentration of small tickets are consistent with an actively managed account rather than a handful of directional trades.

That is also the administration's position: the White House and the Trump Organization have said the President does not direct the account. The disclosures cannot settle that question either way; they record what was traded and when. What they do establish is that a sitting president's reportable activity now runs to thousands of transactions a year, which is why the President's filings have joined congressional filings as a routine part of political trading research. Press coverage has focused on timing, with Fortune reporting in May that first-quarter activity coincided with several of the administration's own market-moving decisions and the Washington Examiner reporting purchases made days before the President publicly praised the companies involved. Readers can check any individual transaction against the OGE forms themselves.

## Where the two lists overlap

Eight companies appear both among the stocks bought by the most members of Congress in 2026 and among the securities traded most often in the President's account: Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon, Home Depot, UnitedHealth, IBM, Netflix and Uber. The overlap says more about the market than about coordination. These are among the largest and most widely held U.S. companies, and they show up in almost any broad portfolio. It is nonetheless a useful screen: a name that is being bought across parties in Congress, traded in the President's account, winning federal contracts and lobbying actively is a name worth understanding before you own it.

## The policy backdrop: a ban that passed one chamber

On July 22, 2026, the House passed the [Stop Insider Trading Act (H.R. 7008)](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7008) by 232 to 198, with every Republican and 13 Democrats in favor. The bill prohibits members of Congress, their spouses and their dependent children from purchasing individual stocks while in office; existing holdings are allowed. It was the first congressional stock trading ban to receive a vote on the House floor. Most Democrats voted no, arguing that the bill did not go far enough and objecting to its pairing with unrelated voter-identification provisions. The bill now sits in the Senate, where a broader proposal that would also cover the President and Vice President cleared committee in 2025. As of this writing, no ban has become law, and the issue is being argued in campaign advertising across competitive districts.

For investors the practical point is that the disclosure regime described in our [guide to the legality of congressional trading](https://tradercongress.com/blog/is-congressional-stock-trading-legal) still applies in full: trades remain legal, reporting remains mandatory, and the 45-day window remains the binding constraint on what you can see and when.

## What to watch between now and January

- **Post-election filings.** Trades executed from September 19 onward can be reported after November 3. Expect a cluster of filings in mid-November and December covering the final weeks of the campaign.
- **Lame-duck activity.** Members who retire or lose keep trading rights until January 3, 2027. Their filings in November and December have historically been among the most revealing of the cycle because campaign scrutiny is gone.
- **The President's next reports.** July's transactions were filed on September 22; August's should appear in October and September's in November. Each report has added roughly a thousand transactions.
- **Sectors tied to the outcome.** Control of either chamber changes the prospects for tariff policy, defense appropriations, drug pricing, energy permitting and digital-asset legislation. Congressional and presidential trades in those sectors after Election Day will be read against the result.
- **Senate action on the ban.** A vote, a merger with the Senate proposal, or a quiet death in the lame duck are all possible; each changes the outlook for the disclosure data itself.

## How to follow it

TraderCongress checks the official House and Senate disclosure sources every hour and updates the President's transactions as new reports are released. The Trump Trades tab in the dashboard lists every disclosed transaction with its filing date, transaction type and amount range, and Pro subscribers can set [alerts](https://tradercongress.com/blog/congress-stock-trade-alerts) for a ticker, a member of Congress or a new presidential filing. The free plan shows congressional trades on a 60-day delay, which for the final weeks of this campaign means seeing them after the votes are counted. [Start free](https://tradercongress.com/signup) or [compare plans](https://tradercongress.com/pricing).

## Caveats

Disclosures report ranges, not exact amounts, and filers can amend them. A purchase or sale by a member of Congress or by the President is a data point, not a recommendation, and past patterns do not predict future returns. The White House disputes that the President directs the trades reported in his name. TraderCongress presents the filings as reported and does not offer investment advice; see our [disclaimer](https://tradercongress.com/disclaimer).

## Frequently asked questions

### How many stock trades has President Trump disclosed in 2026?

Periodic Transaction Reports (OGE Form 278-T) filed for President Trump list 6,977 securities transactions dated January 2 to July 31, 2026, as collected in the TraderCongress database through September 22: 3,787 purchases and 3,190 sales across 2,548 different securities. The first-quarter report alone, released by the Office of Government Ethics on May 14, 2026, listed 3,642 transactions. No previous sitting president has reported activity on this scale.

### Does President Trump personally direct these trades?

The White House and the Trump Organization have said the President has no role in directing the trades and that the account is managed by a third party. The disclosures themselves cannot confirm or refute that; they record what was traded, when, and in what amount range. The STOCK Act requires the President to report the transactions regardless of who places them.

### Are members of Congress trading more or less before the 2026 midterms?

Less. Members disclosed 3,277 trades dated January 1 to September 22, 2026, compared with 8,627 over the same window in 2025, and January through July 2026 shows 2,952 trades against 7,273 a year earlier, a decline of about 59%. The number of members filing trades in a typical month has fallen from the mid-40s to the low 30s. The last two months are still incomplete because of the 45-day filing window.

### Did Congress pass a stock trading ban in 2026?

The House did. On July 22, 2026 it passed the Stop Insider Trading Act (H.R. 7008) by 232 to 198, which would prohibit members of Congress, their spouses and dependent children from purchasing individual stocks while in office, while allowing existing holdings. The Senate has not acted on it as of September 30, 2026, so no ban has become law and the STOCK Act's disclosure rules continue to apply unchanged.

### Can congressional trades made before Election Day stay hidden until after the vote?

Yes. The STOCK Act gives members up to 45 days to report a trade. With Election Day on November 3, 2026, any trade executed after September 19 can legally be disclosed after voters have gone to the polls. Trades in the final weeks of a campaign therefore tend to surface in mid-November and December filings.

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Markdown version of https://tradercongress.com/blog/2026-midterms-congress-trump-trading-report. TraderCongress tracks U.S. congressional stock trades, SEC insider filings, federal contracts, lobbying and dark pool data for investors in the United States and Canada; official disclosures are checked every hour. It is informational only, not financial advice.

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