Congressional Trade Copying in Alpaca Paper
Build a scheduled congressional trade copier for Alpaca paper with disclosure-aware sizing, duplicate protection, and honest backtests.
Before & after
Same prompt, same agent — the only difference is the skill.
That's an interesting idea. To copy political trades, you'd need to connect to Capitol Trades first and pull the latest disclosures. You'd probably want to identify which politicians have the strongest recent track record. Then you could set up a script to monitor those trades and execute them in your Alpaca account. I'd be happy to help you think through each step — parsing the data, comparing against your brokerage, handling timing. Would you want equal weighting, or position sizing based on the original? How frequently should you check for new disclosures? Let me know your preferences and I can help sketch out the architecture.
SELECTED POLITICIAN: 18 disclosed trades past 4 months. Recent return 3.7% vs S&P 0.9%. Status: active trader, acceptable volatility profile. SCHEDULE CONFIGURED: Check Capitol Trades every 48 hours at 10:00 UTC. New buys execute as limit orders next trading day open. Sell signals execute at market same day. TRADE LOG (past month): Jun 18 — BUY 30 shares semiconductor ETF → executed Jun 19 09:30 at 47.22 Jun 28 — SELL 45 shares financials → executed Jun 28 15:45 at 52.11 Jul 5 — BUY 35 shares clean energy → executed Jul 6 09:50 at 63.48 BACKTEST RESULTS (trailing 12 months, 50K starting balance): Mirrored portfolio: 67,400 (+34.8%) S&P 500 benchmark: 61,050 (+22.1%) Outperformance: +12.7 points EXECUTION DETAILS: Brokerage: Alpaca paper account Trade size: 2% account per trade Excluded: penny stocks, volume below 1M shares daily Next sync: Jul 31 10:00 UTC Account status: ready to copy
About this skill
“Copy their trades” sounds simple until a weeks-old disclosure triggers twice, a disclosed sale opens an unintended short, or a backtest buys before the filing was public. This workflow turns congressional disclosures from Capitol Trades into a controlled Alpaca paper strategy with explicit sizing and an auditable execution trail.
What it does
- Selects a politician using supported disclosure and performance evidence, distinguishing reported returns from a reproducible copying strategy.
- Normalizes transaction dates, publication dates, ownership, transaction types, amount ranges, and ticker mappings.
- Builds scheduled polling with persistent checkpoints, amendment handling, duplicate protection, and order reconciliation.
- Copies eligible buys and sells using fixed-dollar sizing, available cash, and strategy-owned inventory.
- Tests performance using public availability dates, realistic execution assumptions, and a comparable benchmark.
- Reports copied, skipped, pending, and failed transactions with reasons and broker order IDs.
What you get
A configuration, self-contained implementation when requested, scheduling instructions, and a per-cycle trade report. With authorized tools and credentials available, the workflow can configure and verify the paper setup; otherwise it supplies the implementation and identifies what remains unverified.
Best for
Retail traders and developers testing whether delayed congressional disclosures produce a useful, reproducible paper strategy before drawing conclusions from headline returns.
SKILL.md preview
---
name: congressional-trade-copying-in-alpaca-paper
description: Build and operate a scheduled congressional-disclosure copier using Capitol Trades and Alpaca paper trading, with public-availability timestamps, persistent deduplication, inventory-aware orders, and reproducible benchmark comparisons. Use when the user says "copy congressional trades", "follow a politician in Alpaca paper", "find the best politician to copy", "schedule a Capitol Trades monitor", "my copier keeps placing duplicate orders", "why does my backtest look too good", or "mirror disclosed buys and sells".
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# Congressional Trade Copying in Alpaca Paper
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