George McCain ’23 Wins 2021 Congressional App Challenge

Ever wondered how your U.S. Senator invests his or her money? Thanks to George McCain ’23, there’s an award-winning app for that! McCain’s SenateTrades, an accessible digest of senatorial stock transactions, won the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 10^th Congressional District.

While senatorial stock transactions are publicly available (on sites such as SenateStockWatcher from which SenateTrades draws its data), McCain’s creation provides analysis. It shows the performance of individual stock portfolios and how each is doing compared to the broader market. “SenateTrades is dedicated to holding public officers accountable by promoting financial and political transparency,” said McCain.

The app, the Fourth Former explained, was created because he feels “it's important that [Americans] can see what stocks the people who represent them are buying and they can tell, and actually decipher for themselves, whether those people are worthy of their support.”

McCain said his research was inspired by the 2020 U.S. congressional insider stock trading scandal, in which a number of senators were accused of using data from private, COVID-19 briefings to inform their stock trades.  “Allegedly, these senators had material, nonpublic information from the hearings that indicated the severity of the impact of COVID-19 on financial markets and protected their portfolios accordingly,” McCain stated. “Watching this unfold in the news, I knew that there was a way to better hold senators accountable.”

McCain used funding from his 2021 Lawrenceville Welles Award to support development and design costs as well as server and data processing fees.  The annual Welles Awards, established in memory of William Bouton Welles ‘71, fund Third and Fourth Form student research projects.

The Congressional App Challenge is an official initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives, where members of Congress host contests in their districts for middle and high school students, encouraging them to learn to code and inspiring them to pursue careers in computer science. Each participating member of Congress selects a winning app from their district, and each winning team is invited to showcase their winning app to Congress during their annual #HouseOfCode festival, to be held this year on April 20-22 in Washington, D.C.

For additional information, please contact Lisa M. Gillard Hanson, director of Public Relations, at lgillard@lawrenceville.org.