I thought they have 60 days to report trades [1] and there are a bunch of stock-based investments that explicitly don't require reporting (EIF's)? Sure, if somebody decides to voluntarily file on day 1, or buy stock "raw" that's cool, but in general there should be quite significant lag or gaps (to the point where short/medium-term there's no signal basically).

[1] https://ethics.house.gov/sites/ethics.house.gov/files/docume...

You’re right that 60 is the limit, but many people file them much sooner.

That layers on a lot of complexity onto the idea of “mimic Congress stock trades”.

Now I have to decide if their hot tip hit or not. Was it a long term play? Does the committee decision get published in five weeks, so they wanted to move now?

I am sure there is signal worth exploiting, but an index fund still seems the more appropriate strategy without significant development on how to follow their moves.