01 · Mobile · Civic Tech

Capitol Gains

EXPERIMENT

Follow the trades. Follow the people.

Capitol Gains turns official congressional financial disclosures into a clear, followable feed. It uses the CongressInvests API, which aggregates Senate EFD filings and House Clerk STOCK Act disclosures, so people can follow the trades — and the people making them — without drowning in PDFs.

React Native · TypeScript · REST API · Mobile development · Notifications

GitHub

Featured product

Built to make public disclosures feel followable.

Browse members, follow their disclosed trades, and stay current as new STOCK Act filings land.

Capitol Gains on a phone

Overview

Capitol Gains is a mobile app for following congressional trading activity. Users can browse disclosed trades, follow members of Congress, and stay current as new filings appear — built on public data, presented like a product people actually want to open.

The Problem

Congressional trading disclosures are public, but they are not usable. Senate EFD filings and House STOCK Act reports live in awkward official systems, dense PDFs, and delayed dumps. If you want to understand what elected officials are trading, you should not have to become a records clerk first.

The Experience

  • Follow members of Congress and see their disclosed trading activity in one place.
  • Browse recent trades without excavating official disclosure portals.
  • Receive notifications when new activity lands.
  • Read context that makes a filing feel like a story, not a spreadsheet.

Technology

  • Built with React Native and TypeScript for a single mobile codebase.
  • Consumes the CongressInvests REST API, which aggregates official Senate EFD and House Clerk STOCK Act disclosures.
  • Notification-ready architecture so new filings can surface without requiring a manual refresh ritual.

Technical Decisions

  • Treat disclosures as a product problem, not a data dump. The interface should feel like following people, not querying a government database.
  • Use CongressInvests as the aggregation layer rather than scraping official sites directly — official sources remain the system of record, but the app should not inherit their UX.
  • Ship mobile-first. This is the kind of information people check in a spare minute, not at a desktop with three monitors.

Challenges

  • Disclosure data is messy: delayed, inconsistently structured, and occasionally incomplete. The product has to stay honest about what the filings actually say.
  • Translating official records into a humane mobile experience without over-interpreting the data.
  • Selecting a suitable API for the project.

What I'd Improve

  • Richer follow graphs and smarter alerts without turning the app into noise.
  • Clearer explanations of what a disclosure does — and does not — tell you.
  • Add a way to track the performance of the app over time.
  • Enable users to complete the trades in the app, rather than having to go to the official website.

← All work