**Use the CongressInvests API to watch specific tickers and fire a Slack alert the moment a new congressional trade is disclosed — no scraping required.

**canonical_url: https://congressinvests.com/blog

Most retail investors find out about congressional stock trades days or weeks after the fact — scrolling through Twitter, or stumbling on a news article. By then, the market has already reacted.

There's a better way. The STOCK Act requires members of Congress to disclose trades within 45 days. Those disclosures are public the moment they're filed. With the CongressInvests API, you can get notified within hours of a new filing — often before most financial media covers it.

In this guide, we'll build a Python bot that watches specific tickers and fires a Slack alert the moment a new congressional trade is disclosed.

What you'll need

Python 3.8+

A Slack webhook URL (free — instructions below)

A CongressInvests API key for real-time webhooks, or just use the free tier (100 req/day) for polling

No API key…