Who beats the market

Funds: each quarter's 13F holdings valued at the next quarter's prices, from the filings themselves. That misses trades inside the quarter, shorts, options, bonds, cash and fees, so it isn't what clients earned.

Members of Congress: trades are reported as dollar ranges, so we use the middle of each range. We rebuild a household portfolio (the member, spouse and children) from every reported stock, fund and option trade, at that day's closing price; a sale removes the shares. An option counts as a position in its stock worth the premium paid: calls as owning it, puts as betting against it. It closes when it's sold, when it expires (where the filing's text gives the date), when the member buys the stock itself (usually an exercise), or after two years. That leaves out an option's leverage, so big option winners and losers look smaller here than they were. Each quarter, the holdings at the start are valued at the end, the same as for funds. Bonds and positions bought before 2020 or never reported are missing. The leaderboard leaves out members with fewer than 10 scored trades or fewer than five different stocks bought. Once a member has bought, quarters with nothing held count as cash (0%).

Both: prices are split-adjusted closes without dividends. "A year, 5 yr" is the annualized return over the last five years (or since the first quarter we can measure). "Swings" is annualized volatility of the quarterly returns, "worst drop" the deepest fall from a peak, and "quarters beating S&P" the share of quarters whose return was higher than the S&P 500's. "Beating the market" always means doing better than the same money would have done in the S&P 500 over the same days. The S&P 500 is the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY): +11.8% a year over five years.