Scrape public filings of the buy + sell orders of U.S. senators and calculate their returns. This repo contains a script to scrape the electronic filings at https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/ and a Jupyter notebook to analyze the results.
python3, Selenium
Scrape all of the senators' filings: python3 main.py
Analyze the results by starting a Jupyter server and going through the notebook: jupyter notebook
- We only look at electronic publicly filed trades by senators. Some periodic transaction reports are PDFs, which are ignored.
- We calculate returns only using the trades observed. This is almost definitely not representative of a senator's entire portfolio. A more accurate way of thinking about the returns is a portfolio that mimics the observed buys and sells.
- If the periodic transaction report specifies a range ($1000 - $5000), then we assume the amount is the lower bound.
- We ignore trades for tickers that do not have data through the Yahoo Finance API.
- The portfolio is not allowed to go short.