My mind doesn't shut off. It never has. I'll be doing yard work, working in the garage, halfway through a movie with my family, or sitting in front of the TV pretending to watch it — and a question pops into my head. Usually one that doesn't have an easy answer. Then it's over. That question is all I think about until I figure it out.
Sometimes it's theology. I'll start with one Bible verse, then end up studying the history behind it, the culture it was written in, the original language, and how everything connects. Somewhere along the way, the original question usually changes into something much bigger. I don't just learn something — I walk away seeing God differently. Other times it's not spiritual at all. It's a broken process at work. A pattern that doesn't make sense. A problem everyone has accepted that I just can't leave alone. I don't go looking for these questions. They find me.
When I tell people about Project Blackbook, they assume it was built during long nights in front of a computer. Honestly, not really. Those long nights are reserved for something else. When anxiety gets loud, when I start questioning myself, when every mistake I've ever made suddenly wants to remind me it exists, I don't write code. I worship the Lord. Not because it's part of some routine. Because it aligns my sight on my creator, because I need Him. Worship is one of the only things that quiets my mind. Late night worship sessions help me align priorities. Protecting this time is how Project Blackbook was built.
"I don't go looking for these questions. They find me."
Project Blackbook gets built in the moments in between. While I'm doing yard work. Driving. Waiting. Early in the morning before the day starts. Late in the evening before I call it a night. Little pieces at a time, because that's all the time I have.
Like everyone else, I'd heard the jokes. "Pelosi money." "They always seem to know." So I did what I always do — I went looking for the data.
Congressional trading disclosures are public under the STOCK Act, but they're a mess. Stocks, options, ETFs, bonds, cryptocurrency, mutual funds — it's all there, but it's scattered, delayed, and incredibly difficult to make sense of. And one question kept bothering me: if I'm seeing this trade three weeks after it happened, does it even matter anymore?
I started looking for someone who had already answered that. I found websites that tracked pieces of it. Some were decent. Some were expensive. Most only scratched the surface. None of them answered the question I actually cared about. So I decided to build something that would.
I've worked in Quality for the better part of fifteen years. At its core, quality is pretty simple — you take something messy and make it useful. You take confusing information and turn it into something people can actually make decisions with. That's exactly what I saw here. This wasn't really a finance problem. It was a quality problem. The data already existed. It just wasn't usable.
And that question kept coming back: does this information still have value after it becomes public? It had the same feeling as all those other questions that have followed me my entire life — the ones that won't leave until I do something about them. So I did.
I build the same way I solve problems. Start small. Break it. Fix it. Repeat. What I didn't expect was how much this project would grow. Answering that one question meant collecting years of historical pricing data, tracking current market prices, processing tens of thousands of disclosures, and building a system that could measure what actually happened instead of guessing.
I built it myself. No investors. No development team. Just me. Every bug is mine. Every mistake is mine. Every victory is mine too. I'll be honest — there were plenty of moments I wondered if I was capable of pulling it off. I still have those moments. The same brain that won't stop asking questions also won't stop questioning itself. Some days that's exhausting. But giving up has never really been an option.
"He just said it deserved to exist."
I showed an early version to a friend. He spent a few minutes clicking around, and said "Dude, this is awesome. You need to share it." He didn't tell me I'd get rich. He didn't tell me it would be successful. He just said it deserved to exist. That conversation became Project Blackbook.
TheOracle — the intelligence system behind Project Blackbook — is named after the character in The Matrix. Yeah, I'm a bit of a nerd. But what I always liked about her wasn't that she handed people answers. She helped them discover the answers for themselves. That's what I want this platform to do.
I'm not trying to predict the future. I'm not telling people what to buy. I'm not accusing anyone of anything. I'm taking public information that's buried under thousands of filings and turning it into something regular people can actually understand. Because not everyone has millions of dollars to invest. Most of us just want to know whether the information means anything at all. That's the question I've been trying to answer from the beginning.
I'm still not convinced anyone else thinks about these things the way I do. Maybe they don't. That's okay. I've never been very good at ignoring questions.
What I do know is that the platform has grown far beyond that first question. Today, Project Blackbook tracks more than 38,000 congressional trades dating back to 2012, covering 299 active members of Congress. The system continuously measures how those disclosed trades perform over time — not because the numbers are the point, but because the numbers are the answer. They're what the question was always asking for.
Somewhere, someone is probably doing yard work, pretending to watch a movie, or lying awake wondering exactly what I was wondering — does this data actually tell us anything?
I built Project Blackbook because I wanted that answer. If it helps answer that question for someone else too, then every bug, every doubt, and every hour spent building it was worth it.
— Stephen
The question deserved an answer. Here's what we built.