CopyGov research guide
Trade date vs. disclosure date: why the gap matters
Understand transaction, publication, detection, and modeled entry dates before interpreting a politician’s stock return.
Four dates describe different events
The transaction date describes when the reported purchase or sale occurred. The disclosure date describes the filing or publication recorded by the source. The detection time describes when a tracker first observed it. A research entry date is an explicit modeling choice for evaluating an outcome.
These fields are not interchangeable. A tracker discovering a document today does not make every transaction inside it a trade made today. Likewise, a filing-date field does not necessarily provide a precise publication timestamp.
A simple hypothetical example
Suppose a stock was bought on June 1, its disclosure was published on June 20, and the stock rose from $100 to $120 in between. A reader learning about the purchase on June 20 did not have access to the $100 entry on the basis of that filing.
If the stock later reached $126, the move from $100 would be 26%, while the move from $120 would be 5%, before costs. Neither percentage establishes what a real investor earned. This example is hypothetical; it is not a CopyGov signal.
How to read the CopyGov comparison
Look at the source document, recorded publication date, modeled entry, and outcome end date together. The modeled entry uses a subsequent trading session, with stock and benchmark evaluated over corresponding dates. Missing entry prices should leave a result unavailable.
An after-publication comparison addresses a more useful question for a reader, but does not eliminate uncertainty about data quality, execution, fees, liquidity, or source delays. A date-based model is not a real brokerage execution record.