Suspicious Timing
Major political announcements move markets. These are congressional trades that happened in the 10 days before those announcements, in the exact stocks and sectors that were affected. Trades made after are excluded - that's just public information. What's left is the suspicious part.
How this works
For each major political event, we search our database of 41,860 congressional trade disclosures for any trades in affected tickers in the 10 days before the event. We only show trades made before the announcement - trades made after are irrelevant since the information was already public. A trade before an event could mean foresight, routine portfolio activity, or pure coincidence. We flag the timing - you decide what it means.
Venezuela Maduro capture bet - $32K turned into $400K
A trader turned roughly $32,000 into more than $400,000 by betting on the capture of Venezuela's Nicol?ís Maduro before it was announced publicly.
| Timing | Politician | Tickers | Action | # Trades | Est. Value | Owner(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
9d before
Dec 24, 2025
|
Gil Cisneros Dem | MELI | Sell | 1 | $8K | Not disclosed |
Oil/defense buys cluster in 11 days before Hamas attack on Israel
In the 11 trading days before the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, multiple lawmakers bought the exact sectors that would rally on the war: defense contractors and oil majors. Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, bought CVX, COP, and RTX in a joint-owner basket on October 3 - four days before the attack. Rep. Ro Khanna's (D) family tripled down on ConocoPhillips (COP) on September 29, with two child-account lots and a spouse lot. Rep. Greg Stanton (D-AZ) bought CVX, COP, and XOM in a single-day basket on September 26. Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) bought Northrop Grumman (NOC) on September 26. The pattern - defense plus oil, concentrated in the two weeks before a major Middle East conflict - is a temporal correlation worth examining.
| Timing | Politician | Tickers | Action | # Trades | Est. Value | Owner(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
10d before
Sep 27, 2023
|
Jared Moskowitz Dem | RTX | Sell | 1 | $8K | Not disclosed |
|
8d before
Sep 29, 2023
|
Ro Khanna Dem | COP | Buy | 3 | $24K | Child, Spouse |
|
4d before
Oct 3, 2023
|
Markwayne Mullin Rep | COP CVX RTX | Buy | 3 | $24K | Joint |
A note on what this page shows
This page maps publicly disclosed congressional trades against documented political events. A trade near an event is not proof of wrongdoing - members of Congress trade frequently, and coincidences happen. What matters is the pattern: when the same sectors and tickers keep appearing in the days before market-moving announcements, the question shifts from "is this suspicious?" to "how often does this happen?"
The larger suspicious trading incidents (the $580M pre-dawn oil futures bet, the $950M ceasefire trade) involve anonymous market participants - not necessarily Congress members. We include those events for context because they show the environment in which congressional trading happens.