What Congress
Knew

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act was designed to answer a specific question: did members of Congress trade on information the public did not have? For the week surrounding April 7, 2025, the public disclosure record gives us a partial answer. Partial is the operative word.

Parts 1 and 2 of this series documented an anomaly. On April 7, 2025, SPY traded $47.7 billion above its five-day baseline, a residual of 262 percent, with no public catalyst. QQQ followed at plus 233 percent. Two days later, on April 9, the administration announced a 90-day tariff pause. The market responded to that announcement with an additional 86 percent and 106 percent elevation in SPY and QQQ respectively, confirming that the April 7 volume was not a reaction to news that had already been released.

Part 3 examined the options flow layer. On April 7, QQQ's near-ATM call/put ratio was 1.29 — call-heavy, during a freefall, while every surrounding day was put-heavy. April 8, the day before the announcement, came in at 0.43. The directional signal is as anomalous as the volume signal, and it points the same direction. Part 4 examines the disclosure record. We searched the congressional trading database across the instruments that captured the anomaly: SPY, QQQ, and TQQQ. We then reviewed the actual Periodic Transaction Reports filed with the House Clerk for the period surrounding the event. What the record shows, and what it cannot show, are both findings.

The Disclosure Record: SPY, QQQ, TQQQ

The STOCK Act requires members of Congress to disclose financial transactions exceeding $1,000 within 45 days of the transaction. Periodic Transaction Reports are filed with the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate and are publicly available. We queried the full congressional trading record for SPY, QQQ, and TQQQ across the February through May 2025 window.

Not one member of Congress disclosed purchasing SPY, QQQ, or TQQQ before April 7. The $47.7 billion anomaly in SPY and the $26.5 billion anomaly in QQQ cannot be attributed to disclosed congressional trading in the broad market instruments that captured it.

Tim Moore, a Republican representative from North Carolina, purchased TQQQ on April 17 and 22 and sold on April 23, all after the pause announcement on April 9. Those trades are post-event positioning, not pre-event. His filing came 57 days after the April 17 transaction, past the 45-day deadline.

The One Signal the Record Contains

The disclosed congressional trading record does not show purchases in SPY, QQQ, or TQQQ before the April 7 anomaly. It does show something else. The Periodic Transaction Reports filed by then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia's 14th District, covering the period from March through April 9, 2025, contain a structural pattern that is documented, sourced to official filings, and notable.

Greene was, during the April 2025 period, a sitting Member of Congress. She resigned effective January 5, 2026. All trades described below were properly disclosed under the STOCK Act. She was under no obligation to disclose them before the deadlines she met, and the act of disclosure is itself compliance. This article presents the public record as it exists.

March: Accumulation

Filing 20028002, signed March 19, 2025, shows 12 individual stock purchases on March 17 spanning technology, industrials, healthcare, and logistics, alongside a US Treasury Bill purchase in the $100,001 to $250,000 range. Filing 20028016, signed March 23, shows another Treasury Bill purchase of $100,001 to $250,000 on March 20. Filing 20029028, signed March 26, shows a third Treasury Bill purchase of $100,001 to $250,000 on March 25.

Treasury Bills are short-duration cash equivalents. Purchasing them in three separate tranches across eight days in mid-to-late March, while simultaneously making individual equity purchases, represents a defensive rotation: maintaining market exposure through individual stocks while building a cash position that can be redeployed.

April 3 through April 4: The Liberation Day Response

Liberation Day was April 2. The tariff announcement came after market close. The market opened on April 3 in freefall.

The composition of the April 3 and 4 purchases spans technology (AAPL, DELL, LRCX, QCOM), logistics (FDX, ODFL, NSC, UPS), consumer discretionary (NKE, LULU, RH), financials (JPM, BRK.B), and industrials (CAT). This is not a sector bet. It is a bet on a broad market recovery, made during a selloff that, at the time of purchase, had no publicly announced end date.

April 7: The Filing

Filing 20029089 was digitally signed on April 7, 2025. On the same day, the president posted "GREAT TIME TO BUY" on Truth Social. SPY traded $47.7 billion above its five-day baseline.

The timing is a fact of the public record, not an inference. The filing was signed on April 7. The post went up April 7. The anomalous volume occurred April 7. These three events share a date.

April 8: The Rotation

The analytically significant element is not the equity buying. Buying during a selloff is a common investment behavior, and Greene's March filings establish that she is a consistent dip-buyer. The significant element is the Treasury Bill sale on April 8.

She accumulated T-Bills across three purchases in eight days during mid-to-late March, building a defensive cash position totaling between $300,000 and $750,000 in Treasury instruments. On April 8, one day before the tariff pause announcement, she sold T-Bills and purchased 11 additional equities. She rotated from defensive cash equivalents into equities the day before the market-moving announcement.

This is the disclosed record. It is sourced to official filings. It does not establish that she knew the announcement was coming. It establishes that the timing of her defensive-to-offensive rotation coincides precisely with the event the investigation has been measuring.

What the Record Cannot Tell Us

The STOCK Act disclosure record answers one question and leaves a larger one open.

What it answers: no member of Congress disclosed purchasing the primary instruments that captured the April 7 anomaly before that date. The $47.7 billion in excess SPY volume did not come from disclosed congressional positions in SPY, QQQ, or TQQQ.

What it cannot answer: where the money came from. The STOCK Act covers members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children. It does not, in real time, cover senior White House staff, cabinet officials, political appointees, or members of the administration who would have had access to a tariff policy decision before it was announced. Those individuals file annual disclosures under the Ethics in Government Act, but they are not subject to the same real-time periodic transaction reporting requirement that applies to congressional members.

The gap between the anomaly and the disclosed record is itself informative. Either the source of the April 7 volume was not in Congress, or it was in Congress and went undisclosed. The non-disclosure possibility is not hypothetical: the penalty for late or missing STOCK Act filings is $200. Tim Moore's 57-day filing on a 45-day instrument is one of many such late filings in the disclosure database. The compliance regime has no enforcement teeth proportionate to the trading profits that foreknowledge of a market-moving announcement would generate.

The Structural Finding

Market Sentinel was built to detect whether markets behaved as if someone knew. The equity layer, presented in Parts 1 and 2, found that on April 7, 2025, they did: SPY and QQQ traded at more than three and a half times their normal dollar volume with no public catalyst, while every legitimate news event in seven years of presidential trade policy produced a fraction of that residual. The options layer, presented in Part 3, adds the directional dimension: QQQ's call/put ratio was 1.29 on April 7, call-heavy during a market freefall, while the surrounding days ran from 0.43 to 0.94. Two independent signals, same direction, same day. Part 4 was designed to close the loop by identifying who.

The disclosed record does not close that loop. It narrows the field and raises a structural question that the data alone cannot answer: the disclosure regime that was designed to detect congressional foreknowledge cannot confirm or rule out executive branch foreknowledge, and cannot compel disclosure from the entities most likely to have known.

The April 7 filing by a sitting member of Congress, signed on the same day as the "GREAT TIME TO BUY" post, with a documented defensive-to-offensive rotation the following day, is the strongest single signal the congressional disclosure record contains for this event. It is a data point, not a conclusion. It is sourced, documented, and public. It is the question the disclosure system was designed to answer, unanswered.

PolicyTorque submitted a request for comment to Greene's office and personal communications team. No response was received prior to publication.

The investigation continues. The options data for the post-November 2025 events, including the Supreme Court IEEPA ruling and the Section 122 implementation, is pending. The full event set will be published when complete.