Capitol Trades vs Quiver Quantitative: Which Congress Trading Tracker Fits You

Every Capitol Trades cell comes from capitoltrades.com and every Quiver cell from quiverquant.com or api.quiverquant.com, all checked on 2026-11-02. Capitol Trades blocked our direct requests that day, so its filter list and newsletter come from an archive.org copy of its pages dated 2026-05-31.

Both sites read the same public record: the periodic transaction reports that members of Congress file under the STOCK Act. The difference is what each one builds around it.

Capitol Trades is a free browsing tool. Its trades page puts thirteen filters over one table, and each row shows when the trade happened and how long after it the filing landed. Quiver Quantitative shows the same kind of live congress data for free, then sells a Premium plan whose congress features are about testing and following: a Congress Backtester, a politician portfolio leaderboard and alerts.

So the question is mostly whether you want to look trades up (Capitol Trades covers that for free) or test a strategy built on them (Quiver Premium).

The home page describes the site as "a free solution" for tracking politicians' trades, and the footer names 2iQ Research as the operator. The trades table shows the politician, the issuer, the published date, the traded date, a Filed After gap, the owner, the type, the size range and the price.

Its filter bar is the strongest part of the product. In an archive.org copy of the page from 2026-05-31 it offered committee, political party, chamber, politician state, asset type, transaction type, trade size, market cap, issuer state, transaction label, gender, sector and issuer country. There are also pages per politician, per issuer and per state.

Two limits are on the site itself. The home page says "The historical data available on our website is restricted to the past 3 years." And no paid plan, API or per-trade alert was listed on the pages we read on 2026-11-02; the alert-style product is a weekly newsletter, whose sign-up was on the home page in an archived copy from 2026-05-31.

Quiver covers far more than Congress. Its free Visitor plan lists live data on congress trading, insider trading, government contracts, corporate lobbying, institutional trading, patents and more.

Premium costs $30 a month billed monthly, or $300 a year ($25 a month), as of 2026-11-02. The congress-specific features it adds are:

• Congress Backtester: test trading strategies built on the trades members of Congress disclose.
• Politician Stock Portfolios and Leaderboard: holdings and returns of politicians' portfolios.
• Quiver Alerts, a stock screener across its datasets, a customizable watchlist and exportable data samples.

The Quiver API is sold separately, "starting from just $30/month", with congress trades, congress holdings and politician net worth among its datasets. The FAQ lists a 7-day trial on monthly Premium and 30 days on annual.

Signal8 is the third option here, and we make it. Its politician directory covers senators, representatives and executive branch officials (OGE Form 278-T), with Overview, Trades, Campaign Finance, Committees and Conflicts tabs. Each politician's page shows the average delay between trade and disclosure, and estimated P&L and win rate once you sign in with a free account. A conflicts view lines trades up against the member's committee assignments.

The congress trading statistics page publishes yearly figures, from trade counts to the share of reports with a trade disclosed after the 45-day deadline, with its method on the page. Add a politician to a watchlist and Signal8 alerts you when they file a new trade disclosure. Pro adds the API and an MCP server that lets an AI assistant query the same congress data.

• No cross-politician trade screener. Capitol Trades filters every disclosed trade at once by committee, sector, trade size and more. Signal8 is organised per politician.
• No backtester. Quiver Premium lists a Congress Backtester. Signal8 does not offer one.
• Narrower dataset range. Quiver also covers lobbying, government contracts, patents and other alternative data. Signal8's political data is congress and executive branch trades, committees and campaign donors.
• The API needs Pro. Signal8's API and MCP server come with the $59 plan only.

Capitol Trades fits if you want a free, fast way to look up who traded what, filtered by committee or sector, and the last three years is enough history.

Quiver Quantitative fits if you want to backtest congress-trade strategies, follow politician portfolios on a leaderboard, or pull congress data alongside lobbying and contracts data.

Signal8 fits if you want each politician's trades next to their campaign donors, committees and filing delays, alerts when a specific member files, or congress data in an AI assistant through MCP.

The free Academy guides STOCK Act disclosures and congressional trading data explain what these filings contain and what they leave out.