In 2023, a sitting member of Congress returned 238.9% on his stock portfolio.
He filed every one of those trades with the House Clerk.
By law. In public. On a government website anyone can read for free.
Almost nobody read them.
Figures as published in the Unusual Whales annual congressional trading reports for 2023 and 2024, calculated from mandatory STOCK Act disclosures. S&P 500 figures are total return. These are the disclosed results of individual public officials. They are not Contrail results, and they are not a forecast.
He wasn't the only one.
Every January, a research firm pulls the disclosures Congress is required to file and totals up what each member made that year.
Five names from the last two lists are on the chart above. Click any of them.
Not one of those people is a professional investor. They hold day jobs in Washington.
A sample of disclosures filed under the STOCK Act. Every one is a public document.
They are not lucky.
They are early.
They vote on the industries they invest in.
They sit on the committees that regulate those industries.
They sit in briefings the rest of us read about weeks later.
None of that is a secret, and none of it is against the rules. But since 2012 the law has required them to write down every trade they make — including the trades made by their husband or wife.
The rule is called the STOCK Act. It passed the Senate 96 votes to 3.
Here is the part
almost everyone misses.
A member of Congress has up to 45 days to report a trade.
Forty-five days is a long time in a market. Long enough to build a position. Long enough for a stock to move a long way.
Long enough that by the time a journalist writes the story, the trade is six weeks old.
Most people hear that and assume the edge is gone.
It isn't gone. It moves. The advantage stops being about knowing something first, and starts being about reading the paperwork faster than anyone else and acting on it without hesitating.
That is not a job for a person. It is a job for a machine — and we spent millions building the right one.
Contrail reads every filing
the day it publishes.
Contrail is a proprietary artificial-intelligence engine. Our team spent years building it, and invested millions of dollars into it. It runs on the most powerful AI models on the planet, tuned for exactly one job — and it does that job every business day of the year.
It watches four government systems around the clock. The moment a filing lands, the engine reads it, weighs it against the filer's own track record, sizes it against the money in your account, and places the trade.
And a human stays in the loop. Expert trading oversight reviews the book the engine builds — the AI does the reading at a scale no person could, and experienced people keep the watch.
You do nothing.
Where we are today: Contrail trades on paper. This page describes how the service is designed to work once it manages client accounts. No client money is traded yet.
Sourced
A disclosure publishes on a government portal. The engine has it within minutes.
Scored
The AI weighs it against the filer’s history, the conviction behind the position and the age of the filing.
Sized
Scaled to your balance and your limits. Your trade is your size, not somebody else’s.
Executed
Designed to be placed in your own brokerage account under expert oversight, then reconciled to the penny. Today this step runs on paper.
Once a week you get a short letter telling you what filed, what the engine did about it and what your money did.
The whole thing costs you about ninety seconds of attention a week.
What this is not.
This is not a stock tip service.
We hold no opinions about companies. We forecast nothing. Nobody here is going to call you with a hot idea.
And the filings really are up to 45 days old when we receive them, exactly as they are for everyone else. We cannot change that, and anyone who tells you they can is lying to you.
What we do is read all of them, the day they publish, and act without flinching.
That is the entire product.
Your money never
leaves your account.
No wire transfers. No deposit into somebody's fund. No offshore anything.
Your money sits in a brokerage account in your own name, at a US-regulated custodian, and you can log into it right now.
This is how custody will work when Contrail manages client accounts. Today the book trades on paper and no client account is linked.
Every trade traces back
to the document that caused it.
Open your account on any day and you can see which filing led to which trade.
Who filed it. The hour it published. What the engine scored it. What it did in your account, to the dollar, after our fee.
Most people who handle money ask you to trust them.
We would rather show you the paperwork.
The record so far,
kept in the open.
Black Bird is the book Contrail runs today. It trades on paper. No client money is in it, and nothing below is a live result.
It is two paper accounts. C10 is an overnight book: ten names bought at the close and sold at the next open. Book 2 follows clusters of insider buying. Black Bird is the two held 50/50, and that blend is the line we lead with.
We publish the record as it stands, up or down.
Paper simulation. The paper trading record since 2026-09-08 is updating and will appear here shortly. Paper results are not live trading, are not a client result and are not indicative of future results. Nothing on this page is an offer.
Research record coming. A longer backtest of Black Bird is being prepared. When it is ready it will be shown here, labelled as research and never as live trading.
Access is by invitation.
Contrail is not open to the public and there is no sign-up button.
We work closely with a small number of high-net-worth investors at any one time. Every account is opened on a call with a person, and every portfolio gets the same engine, the same oversight and the same attention — which is the honest reason the number stays small.
If you have capital to put to work and you want our technology running inside your own account, apply below. If it looks like a fit, someone from our team will reach out to you personally.