# Congressional Stock Trading **Congressional stock trading** is the practice of members of Congress buying and selling securities in companies and sectors their committees authorize, appropriate for, and oversee. It is legal, disclosed, and almost entirely unpunished — which makes it one of the clearest illustrations of the vault's structural-corruption thesis. The [[STOCK Act]] (2012) prohibits trading on material nonpublic information and requires periodic transaction reports within 45 days. It does **not** prohibit ownership. A member of the Armed Services Committee may hold defense primes; a member of Energy and Commerce may hold pharmaceutical stock. Late-filing penalties begin at $200 and have been treated by members as a cost of doing business; no member has been prosecuted under the Act. Successive proposals to require divestiture or qualified [[Blind Trust]] arrangements for members and their spouses have repeatedly stalled. The gap between disclosure and divestiture is the whole substance of the issue — see [[Conflict of Interest]] and [[Elite Impunity]]. This is a stub — expand with the pandemic-era trades, the ban-proposal legislative history, spousal-account mechanics, and the reporting-compliance record. ## See Also - [[STOCK Act]] - [[Conflict of Interest]] - [[Elite Impunity]] - [[Corruption]]