On February 13, 2015, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) sold 93 stocks in a single trading day. The combined value of those sales reached $1.4 million, spread across dozens of tickers in a mass liquidation event that reduced his equity portfolio to near zero in a matter of hours.
Tillis had been sworn in as a senator just six weeks earlier, on January 6, 2015. The bulk liquidation occurred as he was joining committees and receiving classified briefings for the first time. Whether the sales were a prophylactic move to avoid conflicts or a response to something he learned in those early weeks, the public record does not say. The STOCK Act requires only that the trades be disclosed, not explained.
CapitolExposed analysis of public STOCK Act filings reveals that Tillis is not an outlier. Multiple members of Congress have executed dozens of trades in a single day, moving millions of dollars through the market in concentrated bursts that more closely resemble institutional block trading than personal investment management.
Patty Murray: Full Portfolio Turnover in 90 Days
Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) sold 83 stocks on June 15, 2017, liquidating $1.245 million in a single session. Three months earlier, on March 16, 2017, she had purchased 78 stocks worth $1.17 million. The combined activity represents a complete portfolio turnover, selling nearly everything she owned and rebuilding the portfolio from scratch, in less than 90 days.
Murray's trading frequency is extraordinary by any standard. Her average gap between consecutive trades is 0.0 days, meaning she routinely executes multiple trades on the same calendar date. Quiver Quantitative estimated her monthly stock gains at $493,000 as of March 2025, a figure that exceeds the annual salary of most Americans.
Murray's net worth is estimated at $3.4 million, modest by Senate standards. But her trading activity generates returns that have significantly outpaced passive index investing.
More recently, Murray has transitioned from individual stocks to mutual funds. Mutual funds are exempt from the STOCK Act's requirement to disclose individual holdings, meaning Murray's current investment activity is effectively invisible to the public. She discloses the fund names but not the underlying positions, a legal but opaque structure that eliminates the kind of trade-by-trade analysis that CapitolExposed performs on her earlier records.
Shelley Moore Capito: 63 Trades, Both Directions, One Day
On April 24, 2018, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito's (R-WV) spousal account executed 63 trades in a single day, totaling $1.12 million. Unlike Tillis's one-directional liquidation, Capito's trades included both buys and sells simultaneously, a pattern that suggests active portfolio rebalancing rather than a simple exit.
Capito's spouse has filed 316 trades across 149 unique tickers, making the Capito household one of the most broadly diversified portfolios in Congress. The sheer number of tickers means the portfolio touches nearly every sector of the economy, creating potential committee overlaps across Capito's Appropriations and Commerce Committee assignments.
Executing 63 trades in a single day is not something a casual retail investor does. The volume and speed suggest either algorithmic execution, a financial adviser operating with broad discretionary authority, or a deliberate restructuring triggered by a specific event.
Sheldon Whitehouse: More Active Than Most Day Traders
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has logged 499 trades that occurred within seven days of another trade in his account. Out of 621 total disclosed trades, Whitehouse was active on 202 distinct trading days. That frequency places him above the median for professional day traders, who typically concentrate activity on specific opportunities rather than trading continuously.
Whitehouse's portfolio includes financial sector stocks (Visa, American Express, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan) that align with his Finance Committee jurisdiction. The rapid-fire pace means his account is constantly cycling in and out of positions, generating short-term gains and losses that would be unusual for a long-term investor.
Whitehouse maintains that a contractually independent account manager handles all trades. The data cannot verify or refute this claim. What the data does show is that the account bearing Whitehouse's name on STOCK Act filings trades at a pace and frequency that exceeds most retail investors and many professionals.
John James: The $50 Million Single Trade
Rep. John James (R-MI) filed a single trade on October 5, 2015, valued at $50 million. That one transaction is the largest individual trade in the CapitolExposed database, exceeding the next-largest by a significant margin.
James is a West Point graduate and Army veteran who built a family logistics business before entering Congress. The $50 million trade likely reflects a business-related financial event rather than a traditional stock market trade, but the STOCK Act filing captures it alongside every other member's equity trades. The disclosure reveals the scale of wealth that some members bring to office and the limitations of a system designed primarily to track retail-scale stock purchases.
Ron Johnson: $25 Million at the Start of the COVID Crash
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) executed a $25 million trade on March 2, 2020. That date falls at the beginning of the COVID-19 market crash, days before Congress received a series of classified briefings on the pandemic's expected economic impact.
Johnson's trade generated significant scrutiny at the time, alongside similar trades by Sens. Richard Burr, Kelly Loeffler, and Dianne Feinstein. The Department of Justice investigated several senators for potential insider trading related to COVID briefings. All investigations were closed without charges.
Johnson has said his trade was planned in advance and unrelated to any briefing. The timing, however, remains in the public record. A $25 million transaction executed at the precise inflection point of the worst market crash in a decade is the kind of coincidence that the STOCK Act was supposed to prevent, or at least deter.
Liberation Day: 2,200 Trades in 55 Days
The most concentrated burst of congressional trading in recent memory occurred around what traders now call "Liberation Day" in April 2025. During a 55-day window surrounding major tariff announcements and trade policy shifts, 53 members of Congress made more than 2,200 trades worth between $34.9 million and $140 million.
The range between the minimum and maximum values reflects the STOCK Act's disclosure brackets: members report trades in ranges ($1,001 to $15,000, $15,001 to $50,000, and so on) rather than exact dollar amounts. The imprecision is intentional. Congress designed the disclosure system, and Congress chose not to require exact figures.
During those 55 days, members on both sides of the aisle traded aggressively in sectors affected by tariff policy: industrials, technology, consumer goods, and materials. The bipartisan nature of the trading activity suggests that the information driving these trades was available across party lines, likely through committee briefings and advance knowledge of policy announcements.
What a Waiting Period Would Change
H.R. 7008 proposes a mandatory seven-day advance notification period before any member of Congress can sell stock. Under this requirement, Tillis's 93-trade liquidation would have required filing 93 separate advance notices a week before execution. Murray's 83-sale day would have been impossible without a week of public telegraphing.
The waiting period is designed to eliminate the speed advantage that members currently enjoy. If the market knows a senator is about to sell, the information asymmetry disappears. The stock price adjusts before the senator can act.
Critics of the waiting period argue that it would effectively force members to hold positions during market downturns, potentially costing them money that any private citizen could protect through timely selling. Supporters counter that this is exactly the point: if holding public office means accepting investment constraints, members can avoid the problem entirely by using blind trusts or index funds.
The current system imposes no speed limit. Members can execute dozens of trades in a single hour, move millions of dollars across dozens of tickers, and file the disclosure 45 days later. The delay between execution and disclosure means the public learns about these bulk trading events weeks after the market has already moved.