The data is not new as a number of other systems cover this but I am happy for it to get more press.
There are a couple things on my top dislikes of US politics and not having more restrictions on politicians is up near the top.
I have to follow much more stringent disclosures and controls as part of a large private entity that does investment. It’s absurd that folks making policy, who have a potentially closer ear to the ground are not more restricted.
The 30 days self reporting disclosure period is a joke too. It’s after the fact, has no real penalty for being late and AFAIK they don’t maintain any real restriction lists so it has no impact.
Agree but in the meantime you have much bigger fish to fry when your president literally pumped two meme cryptocoins. It's like you used to have a house which has a bit of dust and so you're complaining about dusting a bit better in the future, when the current guest just took a huge shit on the floor.
I'd argue two dime-a-dozen pump and dumps is dwarfed by the magnitude of issues that letting politicians exploit trading using policy-making.
The profits they earn is hardly the issue. The issue is they are motivated to set policy or spend as much govt money in a way that benefits their portfolio.
A politician spending an extra billion of public funding to make (say) a half a million themselves is a real issue.
Nancy Pelosi is worth $200 million is "a bit of dust on the floor"?
Her stock-picking record is better than the professional investors despite being very busy with a job in an unrelated field?
Depends on pumping speed. Given the average tenure for Pelosi insider trading, sorry, great investment intuition. The pumping speed is measured in weeks / months instead of hours (like Trump coin).
So being late a few days is not the end of the world.
Congressional (or executive branch.....) stock trading is completely unacceptable and should be totally banned. Full stop.
With that being said- the idea that they're outperforming the market I think has been debunked several times. I'm sure that they're acting in bad faith and believe that they have some kind of precious inside information. But a few different studies have shown that they basically do the same as any group of a few hundred people that pick individual stocks- some outperform, some underperform, and in general their returns are a random walk. See
Most congresspeople are just in index funds. And almost to a person the ones that aren’t are extremely wealthy people with portfolio goals different than indexing the market.
This looks like any other blog spam website pushing newsletters and clickbait. Why is it being upvoted here? Are people upvoting out of anger at politicians trading stocks without looking at the website first?
Yep. Looks like it. The links in comments to ones that do it better are useful. An opportunity for someone to collate and compare as a bit of investigative journalism.
Publicly announcing trades many months ahead should be enough, without having to get too radical about it.
It pretty much prevents benefiting from "subtle insider" trading via being lobbied by corporate officials or getting any friendly hints from them. The problem with "follow Nancy's trades" idea is that by the time the trade is known, the price has already corrected. The first one to complete the trade is often the only one to collect a significant benefit, the followers get scraps.
And it indirectly disincentivizes owning individual stock because prearranged trade of one stock carries a risk of being screwed by market manipulators, while prearranged trade of a broad index fund is not a problem.
Holding public officials to the same standards as insiders should also suffice. Trading windows, pre set trading schedules, immediate disclosures etc. are all easily enforceable solutions. That would allow them to trade as much as they like, but with reasonable restrictions.
It might be reasonable to say they shouldn't own individual stocks (of their own selection), but not owning stocks is unreasonable. They get paid well, but not that well.
That's several times over median but many of us on this site make that much or more. More reasonable restrictions would be things like requiring them to use a blind trust, to restrict investments to index funds or managed portfolios, or something.
I agree; I don't think it's realistic to tell them not to invest at all. The only real way to preserve your money is to invest it somewhere.
I think if the only thing that they could invest in was total-market index funds (or something similar), that would not have too much of a conflict of interest. They'd have the incentive to make the entire market happy, not just individual stocks, which benefits nearly everyone.
If the only stock that politicians owned was VTI or something similar, I think most people would mostly be fine with that. That would still have problem in terms of the uneven weighting, but it would certainly better than what we have right now.
> If they are truly people-oriented as they oath when they join public service, why allow them to own stock at all?
I take this to mean you think that civil servants and members of the military should also be barred from holding stocks?
> But isn't that a significant conflict of interest if they are public service employees?
There is no inherent conflict of interest in owning stocks. The risk is when they own (especially if they are heavily invested in) individual stocks. Use a blind trust like I mentioned or disallow holding individual stocks if they want to manage their own portfolio, then they still have a vested interest in the economy (how well businesses are doing as proxied by the stock market) but their conflicts are limited or removed.
I have no problem with them getting a pension. There are also plenty of other ways to invest your money that aren't putting it right into the stock market. Multiple kinds of bonds, CDs, annuities, etc.
So we were meeting with a group of customers in the morning and we wanted to bring doughnuts to the meeting. Unfortunately, one of the customers was NASA, so we couldn't bring doughnuts to the meeting because that would have been too much of a gift/bribe.
The rules for rank and file employees already exist, it's the ones at the top that can flout the rules that are an issue.
Why not? I've suggested solutions that let them invest without even being aware of what they're invested in or only minimally (index funds, specific portfolios). This resolves the conflict of interest problem while allowing them to still gain the financial benefits of investing some of their money.
I respect the sentiment but I think it should not be as drastic as that. However they should have to follow the same rules and regulations that many insiders follow at public and private firms. Specifically those firms that do investments or trading. The fear of god is put into you about the importance of compliance with MNPI due to enforcement actions from the government yet the government itself pays no mind to it.
Real arms length fully open pension fund would be reasonable. All investments would have to be made in that fund or sub-fund. These would also be fully open to public. And also ban any communication between those making investment decisions and those in office.
If they had broad ETFs that had a whole bunch of companies (like VTI), then conceivably that wouldn't bias their vote as much. They'd have a personal reason to make sure that the entire stock market is doing well.
Even that still encourages them to prioritize corporations over individuals.
There's no actual reason a congressperson needs to own stocks. In fact, we should be doing what we can to enforce a certain "Average American"-ness to their lives so they work to improve the lives of the average american.
Maybe. I think it's not realistic to tell people that they cannot preserve their money into some sort of 401k (or equivalent). It's basically the only way to realistically retire in the US.
IMO broad categories of government employees should be restricted to owning broad index funds. But at least as far as upper echelons of political power - house, senate, supreme court, president and his cabinet - there should scarcely be any debate at all.
Personally I would prefer restricting them to SNP500. US does well - they’ll do well.
Why not? You need a reason. We might as well say they shouldn't be beholden to voters (which is a legit political theory, by the way, there are reasons the US is a Republic).
If we work backwards from the observation that Donald Trump just got elected from his second term and start probing into the whys and wherefores; direct lobbying seems to be the major problem. Politicians stock trading is certainly unseemly but it isn't at all clear whether it is pushing the quality of the decision making in Washington up or down.
There was a school of commentary when Trump was elected in 2016 that said he was unfit to be president because he owned active businesses instead of having the good taste to own stocks like everyone else. The idea was that this opens the door to corruption by allowing people to patronize his business(es) even if they otherwise wouldn't.
I'm intrigued at the extension to the idea that public officials shouldn't own anything at all. What do you want them to do?
In 2016, Trump agreed with that reasoning. He did a whole song and dance about leaving his businesses to his kids. In 2025 he didn't even pretend to hide it.
No one is saying that public officials should own nothing, but the concern is that if they own stock in an individual company, they will have an incentive to vote to benefit that company to drive up the stock price. For example, if I owned a ton of stock in Lockheed Martin, I might be incentivized to vote to declare a war that isn't necessary in order to get a bump in my income.
This doesn't mean that they actually would do this, it's possible that the politicians would have integrity and vote their actual positions, but I think for things like this the appearance of impropriety is almost as bad as actual impropriety. We need to have some level of trust in our political leaders, and having things that look unseemly is almost as bad as actual corruption.
Even if you could prove that Trump now maintaining his businesses has no effect on his political decisions, it would still be bad, because it still gives an appearance of corruption, and that erodes trust in our institutions.
I don't think most people would have a huge problem with politicians having stocks in broad mutual funds, especially if they don't directly know what's being invested in. This would encourage them to make the entire market grow, instead of just individual stocks.
I'm a bit uneducated in the ways of shorting options. Is this topical because Mr. President induced a massive stock market meltdown in the US and his friends could have made a fortune for knowing the details and shorted the most likely biggest loss-makers?
Another great source for trades made by US politicians is https://stockcircle.com/congress-stock-trades. You can see their whole portfolio and also follow other investors like Warren Buffett to see what they are investing in.
Richard Burr may have been convinced to not seek reelection to avoid prosecution.
“a 2012 law, the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, bars members of Congress and their aides from making investment decisions based on inside information they have access to as part of their Senate work, including both criminal and civil penalties for violations. Legal experts say that determining what information is “nonpublic” can be exceedingly difficult; no one has been successfully prosecuted under the law.”
Personally I think Congress should be obligated to invest in US small cap funds only. Perhaps they could also design state versions and you can invest in some mix between US small cap and state based funds.
I'll save everyone hours of headache. The only politician's disclosures that are worth anything are Pelosi's. And by Pelosi, it is actually her husband that trades but that she has to disclose those trades as a politician. You can also copy Pelosi's trades exactly if you are into speculation and you can experience first hand how many of his trades end up -30% or more, but over the course of the year they have a chance of gaining. They gain not so much because there is any meaningful insider information, but because he holds the position for 1 year and we are still in a bull market (even as of tonight).
I think it's amusing that folks think that politicians have any sort of capability to be able to consistently beat the S&P 500.
> we are still in a bull market (even as of tonight).
Are you so sure about that? Presumably tomorrow's > 3% crash will mean we've had more consecutive crashes of note than any other period since the Great Depression.
This is truly one of the most remarkable market downturns in all history, and by all accounts it is only just getting started.
Looking at their performance numbers as a whole, they're nothing special, but the underlying story where they make policy changes that affect the markets, and they're also allowed to bet on that market, just feels so unfair that it's no longer about the numbers but it's about the emotion.
> And you are aware politicians have insider knowledge, correct? That is how you beat the s&p.
No, this is how low info conspiratorial voters think it works, because their worldview is everything is 1. a conspiracy 2. involves "money" in some basic way they can easily imagine.
Insider knowledge doesn't reliably beat passive investing and why would politicians even have it? You can see what they're voting for by watching CSPAN.
Their staffers are in the discussions and do you know that they leak information like sieves. A "top secret business discussion" in Washington, are you kidding me?
I'm sure they are in some discussions, I'm sure both staffers and elected officials are in others, and I'm sure elected officials have some without their staff.
> A "top secret business discussion" in Washington, are you kidding me?
There are those, of course; the incredulity you typed isn't evidence otherwise. But I was referring to top secret discussions that affect businesses; for example, the armed services committees have secret meetings about things that greatly affect companies in the defense industry.
There's literally TS/SCI for several departments, including the DOL, to get post-priced strike prices and costs for options before market open. And no, the prices you see before market open and saying, "Yeah! I can see that too!" is not the same. That's PRE-priced in.
> No, this is how low info conspiratorial voters think it works, because their worldview is everything is 1. a conspiracy 2. involves "money" in some basic way they can easily imagine.
There's no conspiracy in acknowledging that politicians sometimes use their influence for personal gain, when it's convenient. That's just human nature.
I dont think everything is a conspiracy, but it is obvious corruption is rampant in US politics, and who in their right mind would think that that stops at leveraging special committee insider knowledge for personal gains?
Hmm. Good argument. Look into how the revolving door works, or citizens united and it's after-effects... if you're interested in even just the bottom of the barrel to get your feet wet on the topic.
Then why do they suck so bad at it? Why is Pelosi not a billionaire if they have such easy access to privileged info? Why do they barely do any better than anyone else?
The STOCKS Act requires trade disclosures within 30 days but the penalty is only $200 so in theory it lags at most 30 days and maybe less depending on the whims of the Rep/Senator in question. More info at the link below, there are predictably some problems with compliance and the lag means the price change they were potentially reacting to might have already happened but there are examples where it hadn't. eg: We learned about some Members dumping stocks after the confidential briefing before COVID really hit the US.
It's a mixed bag, quicker reporting doesn't really hurt them specifically until they're required to report them in advance of the trade because any time after it they've already made the sale/purchase so you knowing a bit sooner after the trade doesn't really affect their plays. (unless they're gambling on options I guess)
The reports are public so you can scroll through them, the most common pattern (I'm just eyeballing it I haven't found their download to graph it out properly) looks like they just do bulk reports every 30 days so you actually get a mix of old and new trades in each report.
Politically this is useful, but if you want to use it for trading this is, unfortunately, useless, as they have 90 days before they have to report a trade. IIRC.
Also, if you look at congresspeople's gains, on average, they are not that great.
How recent is the data? I want to know what cyber security companies are signing contracts as soon as possible after those congressional committees meet.
I have no doubt some moves were made before those tariffs, but it seemed it was telegraphed to everyone.
He's a SV/SF investor who basically just invests in tech. His returns are about the same as QQQ which makes sense. If he's getting valuable inside information from Nancy to help his trading he's not using it well.
I’m still amazed that people take the Pelosi bait when many other politicians have been far ahead of her on the charts. Most of them are Republicans, though, and haven’t had the same amount of headlines and Twitter/Reddit traffic.
The services pushing politician trade tracking and ETFs really leaned into Pelosi to capitalize on it.
As the other comment already said, her (more specifically, her husband’s) returns haven’t actually been noteworthy or suspect, it’s just the implication that gets people worked up.
> I’m still amazed that people take the Pelosi bait when many other politicians have been far ahead of her on the charts.
This comment doesn't help. You haven't mentioned another politician, either Republican or Democrat, when you had all the room and time in the world to do so.
This line also depends on the fiction that people think that Pelosi is uniquely trading on the information that she learns at her job, rather than just openly and proudly trading on the information that she learns at her job. Other people being corrupt doesn't make the corruption disappear. It isn't like Democrats are positive numbers and Republicans are negative numbers that cancel each other out. We're not looking for equity in corruption.
She isn't trading on anything. Her husband's portfolio manager is trading, mostly pointless over-trading to look busy and get management fees, and it's being reported on her paperwork.
I am happy that this kind of tracking project exists.
The current tariffs policy of Trump's regime could even be a market manipulation for their personal enrichnent: send the stock markets crashing with a very dumb financial decision, buy a lot of stocks when they are low, and right after cancel the dumb decision, and then profit.
They have nuked the SEC for a reason, haven't they?
Oh the product offerings are way ahead of that. Until recently, you could invest in Inverse Jim Cramer. Plenty of passive and active funds for Nancy Pelosi.
Inverse Jim Cramer ETF closed 1 year ago due to lack of interest, sheesh.
To follow Pelosi, just look up the public record on the government website. It tells you the date and the product he used. Then just look up the chart for that day and look at the price range.
The data is not new as a number of other systems cover this but I am happy for it to get more press.
There are a couple things on my top dislikes of US politics and not having more restrictions on politicians is up near the top.
I have to follow much more stringent disclosures and controls as part of a large private entity that does investment. It’s absurd that folks making policy, who have a potentially closer ear to the ground are not more restricted.
The 30 days self reporting disclosure period is a joke too. It’s after the fact, has no real penalty for being late and AFAIK they don’t maintain any real restriction lists so it has no impact.
Agree but in the meantime you have much bigger fish to fry when your president literally pumped two meme cryptocoins. It's like you used to have a house which has a bit of dust and so you're complaining about dusting a bit better in the future, when the current guest just took a huge shit on the floor.
I'd argue two dime-a-dozen pump and dumps is dwarfed by the magnitude of issues that letting politicians exploit trading using policy-making.
The profits they earn is hardly the issue. The issue is they are motivated to set policy or spend as much govt money in a way that benefits their portfolio.
A politician spending an extra billion of public funding to make (say) a half a million themselves is a real issue.
Nancy Pelosi is worth $200 million is "a bit of dust on the floor"? Her stock-picking record is better than the professional investors despite being very busy with a job in an unrelated field?
Could it be because her husband runs an investment firm that existed before she had any real power?
Check out her personal investment history. The party of the working man sure has changed in recent years.
But what about President Carters peanut farm?
Yes if only he'd spent more time on his peanut farm, maybe the US would still have control of the canal in Panama it built.
"He Said He Would Ban Congressional Stock Trading. Now in Office, He Trades Freely." - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/us/politics/congress-stoc...
I haven’t seen Autopilot posted on HN:
joinautopilot.com
No joke, I used to work there until they went RTO. But I liked the product. It's crazy that our politicians can trade like they do.
Isn’t trading off of delayed disclosures basically being dumb money? You’re in a similar position to a pump and dump victim.
Depends on pumping speed. Given the average tenure for Pelosi insider trading, sorry, great investment intuition. The pumping speed is measured in weeks / months instead of hours (like Trump coin).
So being late a few days is not the end of the world.
Do you use it? Tell me more, why this one?
No, it has a feature where it connects to your brokerage in order to execute the trades. That’s rather involved for me.
Turns out I was wrong and it has been submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682786
I like seeing unknown stock tickers show up
Those have been good to copytrade
This kind of site seems to hit the frontpage every 8 months or so.
https://www.quiverquant.com/ is another one I've followed. They do other stuff as well, but they cover congressional trades.
An example: https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/politician/Nancy...
Looks like the post title got the wrong “capital”, the name is Capitol (ie, the Capitol Building, where congresspeople work)
Congressional (or executive branch.....) stock trading is completely unacceptable and should be totally banned. Full stop.
With that being said- the idea that they're outperforming the market I think has been debunked several times. I'm sure that they're acting in bad faith and believe that they have some kind of precious inside information. But a few different studies have shown that they basically do the same as any group of a few hundred people that pick individual stocks- some outperform, some underperform, and in general their returns are a random walk. See
https://studenttheses.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/20.500.12932/47... "no significant abnormal returns" https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4954641 "significantly underperform" https://andy.egge.rs/papers/EggMueller_capitol_losses_jop_20... "between 2004 and 2008 the average member of Congress would have earned higher returns in a passive index fund"
Stick to index funds folks
Most congresspeople are just in index funds. And almost to a person the ones that aren’t are extremely wealthy people with portfolio goals different than indexing the market.
Just the recent tarrifs announcement would have given you serious gains by rebalancing to bonds beforehand and buying the dip.
Or trading VIX derivatives
This looks like any other blog spam website pushing newsletters and clickbait. Why is it being upvoted here? Are people upvoting out of anger at politicians trading stocks without looking at the website first?
Yep. Looks like it. The links in comments to ones that do it better are useful. An opportunity for someone to collate and compare as a bit of investigative journalism.
Public officials should not own stocks full stop.
Publicly announcing trades many months ahead should be enough, without having to get too radical about it.
It pretty much prevents benefiting from "subtle insider" trading via being lobbied by corporate officials or getting any friendly hints from them. The problem with "follow Nancy's trades" idea is that by the time the trade is known, the price has already corrected. The first one to complete the trade is often the only one to collect a significant benefit, the followers get scraps.
And it indirectly disincentivizes owning individual stock because prearranged trade of one stock carries a risk of being screwed by market manipulators, while prearranged trade of a broad index fund is not a problem.
> Publicly announcing trades many months ahead should be enough, without having to get too radical about it.
A complete disclosure of all holdings will also be required, so that you can see if they're picking policy to assist their existing portfolio.
Holding public officials to the same standards as insiders should also suffice. Trading windows, pre set trading schedules, immediate disclosures etc. are all easily enforceable solutions. That would allow them to trade as much as they like, but with reasonable restrictions.
It might be reasonable to say they shouldn't own individual stocks (of their own selection), but not owning stocks is unreasonable. They get paid well, but not that well.
https://radiotv.house.gov/house-data/salaries
That's several times over median but many of us on this site make that much or more. More reasonable restrictions would be things like requiring them to use a blind trust, to restrict investments to index funds or managed portfolios, or something.
I agree; I don't think it's realistic to tell them not to invest at all. The only real way to preserve your money is to invest it somewhere.
I think if the only thing that they could invest in was total-market index funds (or something similar), that would not have too much of a conflict of interest. They'd have the incentive to make the entire market happy, not just individual stocks, which benefits nearly everyone.
If the only stock that politicians owned was VTI or something similar, I think most people would mostly be fine with that. That would still have problem in terms of the uneven weighting, but it would certainly better than what we have right now.
> The only real way to preserve your money is to invest it somewhere
Don’t tell that to folks planning to retire soon.
Unless they had a 6 month career they likely have still done very well
Doing very well and having your expectations abruptly reset are two different things.
But isn't that a significant conflict of interest if they are public service employees?
If they are truly people-oriented as they oath when they join public service, why allow them to own stock at all?
> If they are truly people-oriented as they oath when they join public service, why allow them to own stock at all?
I take this to mean you think that civil servants and members of the military should also be barred from holding stocks?
> But isn't that a significant conflict of interest if they are public service employees?
There is no inherent conflict of interest in owning stocks. The risk is when they own (especially if they are heavily invested in) individual stocks. Use a blind trust like I mentioned or disallow holding individual stocks if they want to manage their own portfolio, then they still have a vested interest in the economy (how well businesses are doing as proxied by the stock market) but their conflicts are limited or removed.
Should all government employees be banned from owning stock?
If it may be involved with or adjacent to the work they are doing, I would say yes.
You gonna give them all a defined benefit pension scheme too because otherwise, how will they save for retirement?
I have no problem with them getting a pension. There are also plenty of other ways to invest your money that aren't putting it right into the stock market. Multiple kinds of bonds, CDs, annuities, etc.
So we were meeting with a group of customers in the morning and we wanted to bring doughnuts to the meeting. Unfortunately, one of the customers was NASA, so we couldn't bring doughnuts to the meeting because that would have been too much of a gift/bribe.
The rules for rank and file employees already exist, it's the ones at the top that can flout the rules that are an issue.
https://www.justice.gov/jmd/gifts-and-entertainment#outside
You can bring coffee and donuts, those are even specifically called out:
> Modest items of food and non-alcoholic refreshments, such as soft drinks, coffee and donuts, offered other than as part of a meal;
Good to know! I'm a software engineer not a lawyer and it's been roughly 20 years since this incident.
[dead]
Then we can pay them more, or not and they can take another job instead. Either way, I can't take you seriously.
> Either way, I can't take you seriously.
Why not? I've suggested solutions that let them invest without even being aware of what they're invested in or only minimally (index funds, specific portfolios). This resolves the conflict of interest problem while allowing them to still gain the financial benefits of investing some of their money.
No need for complexity here. Anyone who needs those benefits to accept the position is a poor choice anyhow. Forget them.
Again, how do people here think public servants will live beyond their service to the government?
Or is the idea that if they choose to work for the government, they need to work until they die.
They can just get paid more. Why do I need to repeat myself?
I respect the sentiment but I think it should not be as drastic as that. However they should have to follow the same rules and regulations that many insiders follow at public and private firms. Specifically those firms that do investments or trading. The fear of god is put into you about the importance of compliance with MNPI due to enforcement actions from the government yet the government itself pays no mind to it.
Real arms length fully open pension fund would be reasonable. All investments would have to be made in that fund or sub-fund. These would also be fully open to public. And also ban any communication between those making investment decisions and those in office.
Index funds seem fine, having some skin in the game is a good idea.
Can cut both ways. If you're on the Fed board, you sell all your stocks before taking office and then crash the market by hiking rates.
What about owning any asset class? real estate? is that allowed? Metals?
Owning stocks isn't the problem, it's trading stocks on non-public information that is the issue
Well the holdings also create a conflict of interest in how they choose to vote.
If they had broad ETFs that had a whole bunch of companies (like VTI), then conceivably that wouldn't bias their vote as much. They'd have a personal reason to make sure that the entire stock market is doing well.
Even that still encourages them to prioritize corporations over individuals.
There's no actual reason a congressperson needs to own stocks. In fact, we should be doing what we can to enforce a certain "Average American"-ness to their lives so they work to improve the lives of the average american.
Maybe. I think it's not realistic to tell people that they cannot preserve their money into some sort of 401k (or equivalent). It's basically the only way to realistically retire in the US.
Fair, but you can own stocks in a blind trust
Pretty much everyone owns stocks.
IMO broad categories of government employees should be restricted to owning broad index funds. But at least as far as upper echelons of political power - house, senate, supreme court, president and his cabinet - there should scarcely be any debate at all.
Personally I would prefer restricting them to SNP500. US does well - they’ll do well.
At least the disclosure shouldn't be lagging.
Why not? You need a reason. We might as well say they shouldn't be beholden to voters (which is a legit political theory, by the way, there are reasons the US is a Republic).
If we work backwards from the observation that Donald Trump just got elected from his second term and start probing into the whys and wherefores; direct lobbying seems to be the major problem. Politicians stock trading is certainly unseemly but it isn't at all clear whether it is pushing the quality of the decision making in Washington up or down.
There was a school of commentary when Trump was elected in 2016 that said he was unfit to be president because he owned active businesses instead of having the good taste to own stocks like everyone else. The idea was that this opens the door to corruption by allowing people to patronize his business(es) even if they otherwise wouldn't.
I'm intrigued at the extension to the idea that public officials shouldn't own anything at all. What do you want them to do?
In 2016, Trump agreed with that reasoning. He did a whole song and dance about leaving his businesses to his kids. In 2025 he didn't even pretend to hide it.
No one is saying that public officials should own nothing, but the concern is that if they own stock in an individual company, they will have an incentive to vote to benefit that company to drive up the stock price. For example, if I owned a ton of stock in Lockheed Martin, I might be incentivized to vote to declare a war that isn't necessary in order to get a bump in my income.
This doesn't mean that they actually would do this, it's possible that the politicians would have integrity and vote their actual positions, but I think for things like this the appearance of impropriety is almost as bad as actual impropriety. We need to have some level of trust in our political leaders, and having things that look unseemly is almost as bad as actual corruption.
Even if you could prove that Trump now maintaining his businesses has no effect on his political decisions, it would still be bad, because it still gives an appearance of corruption, and that erodes trust in our institutions.
I don't think most people would have a huge problem with politicians having stocks in broad mutual funds, especially if they don't directly know what's being invested in. This would encourage them to make the entire market grow, instead of just individual stocks.
The page lists trades from two days ago but doesn't explain how they get their information. Do some congressmen report immediately?
I'm a bit uneducated in the ways of shorting options. Is this topical because Mr. President induced a massive stock market meltdown in the US and his friends could have made a fortune for knowing the details and shorted the most likely biggest loss-makers?
Or is that not how the markets work?
yes. They are called put options. (simplifying)
explained here: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/putoption.asp
Another great source for trades made by US politicians is https://stockcircle.com/congress-stock-trades. You can see their whole portfolio and also follow other investors like Warren Buffett to see what they are investing in.
Richard Burr may have been convinced to not seek reelection to avoid prosecution.
“a 2012 law, the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, bars members of Congress and their aides from making investment decisions based on inside information they have access to as part of their Senate work, including both criminal and civil penalties for violations. Legal experts say that determining what information is “nonpublic” can be exceedingly difficult; no one has been successfully prosecuted under the law.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-wont-charge-sen-richa...
Personally I think Congress should be obligated to invest in US small cap funds only. Perhaps they could also design state versions and you can invest in some mix between US small cap and state based funds.
Given how much power they alte already have , they can just setup their own "small cap fund". Create shell companies that fits the criteria, etc.
If we can't trust the lawmakers, something has fucked up already.
I think we need more transparency, not more restrictions. Trust and Verify.
I'll save everyone hours of headache. The only politician's disclosures that are worth anything are Pelosi's. And by Pelosi, it is actually her husband that trades but that she has to disclose those trades as a politician. You can also copy Pelosi's trades exactly if you are into speculation and you can experience first hand how many of his trades end up -30% or more, but over the course of the year they have a chance of gaining. They gain not so much because there is any meaningful insider information, but because he holds the position for 1 year and we are still in a bull market (even as of tonight).
I think it's amusing that folks think that politicians have any sort of capability to be able to consistently beat the S&P 500.
> we are still in a bull market (even as of tonight).
Are you so sure about that? Presumably tomorrow's > 3% crash will mean we've had more consecutive crashes of note than any other period since the Great Depression.
This is truly one of the most remarkable market downturns in all history, and by all accounts it is only just getting started.
Looking at their performance numbers as a whole, they're nothing special, but the underlying story where they make policy changes that affect the markets, and they're also allowed to bet on that market, just feels so unfair that it's no longer about the numbers but it's about the emotion.
Why are the only trades worth following the Pelosi ones?
He is a professional trader and the others are politicians.
How do his rates of return compare to these politicians?
Hmm this seems like a strange take.
A bull market when we have s&p drops steeper then covid?
And you are aware politicians have insider knowledge, correct? That is how you beat the s&p.
> And you are aware politicians have insider knowledge, correct? That is how you beat the s&p.
No, this is how low info conspiratorial voters think it works, because their worldview is everything is 1. a conspiracy 2. involves "money" in some basic way they can easily imagine.
Insider knowledge doesn't reliably beat passive investing and why would politicians even have it? You can see what they're voting for by watching CSPAN.
> why would politicians even have it? You can see what they're voting for by watching CSPAN.
There are many discussions long before you see anything on C-SPAN, and some are top secret.
Their staffers are in the discussions and do you know that they leak information like sieves. A "top secret business discussion" in Washington, are you kidding me?
> Their staffers are in the discussions
I'm sure they are in some discussions, I'm sure both staffers and elected officials are in others, and I'm sure elected officials have some without their staff.
> A "top secret business discussion" in Washington, are you kidding me?
There are those, of course; the incredulity you typed isn't evidence otherwise. But I was referring to top secret discussions that affect businesses; for example, the armed services committees have secret meetings about things that greatly affect companies in the defense industry.
There's literally TS/SCI for several departments, including the DOL, to get post-priced strike prices and costs for options before market open. And no, the prices you see before market open and saying, "Yeah! I can see that too!" is not the same. That's PRE-priced in.
Taking "time in the market beats timing the market" a bit to the extreme, I think.
> No, this is how low info conspiratorial voters think it works, because their worldview is everything is 1. a conspiracy 2. involves "money" in some basic way they can easily imagine.
There's no conspiracy in acknowledging that politicians sometimes use their influence for personal gain, when it's convenient. That's just human nature.
How is acknowledging that politicians have insider information a conspiracy?
I dont think everything is a conspiracy, but it is obvious corruption is rampant in US politics, and who in their right mind would think that that stops at leveraging special committee insider knowledge for personal gains?
No, that isn't obvious. You just think that because you believe that thinking this makes you cooler.
Hmm. Good argument. Look into how the revolving door works, or citizens united and it's after-effects... if you're interested in even just the bottom of the barrel to get your feet wet on the topic.
Like I said, you're making everything about money in a basic way you can easily imagine.
One thing that happens if you actually watch election results here is 1. the left candidates have more money and 2. it doesn't help.
You should actually make an argument for your case if you care to, rather than streaming baseless assumptions and dangling random comments.
Then why do they suck so bad at it? Why is Pelosi not a billionaire if they have such easy access to privileged info? Why do they barely do any better than anyone else?
I may have missed it, but how "real-time" are these trades? For those trades that appear to be in the last few days, how is it being tracked?
The STOCKS Act requires trade disclosures within 30 days but the penalty is only $200 so in theory it lags at most 30 days and maybe less depending on the whims of the Rep/Senator in question. More info at the link below, there are predictably some problems with compliance and the lag means the price change they were potentially reacting to might have already happened but there are examples where it hadn't. eg: We learned about some Members dumping stocks after the confidential briefing before COVID really hit the US.
https://campaignlegal.org/update/congressional-stock-trading...
In other words, likely about 30 days delayed unless it benefits them to tell you earlier.
It's a mixed bag, quicker reporting doesn't really hurt them specifically until they're required to report them in advance of the trade because any time after it they've already made the sale/purchase so you knowing a bit sooner after the trade doesn't really affect their plays. (unless they're gambling on options I guess)
The reports are public so you can scroll through them, the most common pattern (I'm just eyeballing it I haven't found their download to graph it out properly) looks like they just do bulk reports every 30 days so you actually get a mix of old and new trades in each report.
https://www.capitoltrades.com/trades
Right, within 30 days and no later than 45 days.
Unless you're David Taylor apparently, then it's anywhere from 42 to 63 days
( based on https://www.capitoltrades.com/trades )
Politically this is useful, but if you want to use it for trading this is, unfortunately, useless, as they have 90 days before they have to report a trade. IIRC.
Also, if you look at congresspeople's gains, on average, they are not that great.
How recent is the data? I want to know what cyber security companies are signing contracts as soon as possible after those congressional committees meet.
I have no doubt some moves were made before those tariffs, but it seemed it was telegraphed to everyone.
there was a tool like this for tracking c-suiters and the trades of theirs that relate to their own companies, anyone got a link?
Any historical analysis pointing at following politicians in general or any specific politicians is a good investment?
Does anyone supply US-POL Dem / Rep as an index tracked ETFs?
See https://www.morningstar.com/funds/2-etfs-that-track-congress...
NANC and KRUZ are ETFs that track your favorite politicians stock transactions and replicate in ETF form.
This has been a long standing form of “investing”.
See Pelosi’s husband for his track record of “success”.
He's a SV/SF investor who basically just invests in tech. His returns are about the same as QQQ which makes sense. If he's getting valuable inside information from Nancy to help his trading he's not using it well.
A lot of people don't know about risk-adjusted returns; if you just go riskier your returns will be higher. Until they aren't.
Additionally, he buys tons of options, I think that says a lot.
I’m still amazed that people take the Pelosi bait when many other politicians have been far ahead of her on the charts. Most of them are Republicans, though, and haven’t had the same amount of headlines and Twitter/Reddit traffic.
The services pushing politician trade tracking and ETFs really leaned into Pelosi to capitalize on it.
As the other comment already said, her (more specifically, her husband’s) returns haven’t actually been noteworthy or suspect, it’s just the implication that gets people worked up.
> I’m still amazed that people take the Pelosi bait when many other politicians have been far ahead of her on the charts.
This comment doesn't help. You haven't mentioned another politician, either Republican or Democrat, when you had all the room and time in the world to do so.
This line also depends on the fiction that people think that Pelosi is uniquely trading on the information that she learns at her job, rather than just openly and proudly trading on the information that she learns at her job. Other people being corrupt doesn't make the corruption disappear. It isn't like Democrats are positive numbers and Republicans are negative numbers that cancel each other out. We're not looking for equity in corruption.
She isn't trading on anything. Her husband's portfolio manager is trading, mostly pointless over-trading to look busy and get management fees, and it's being reported on her paperwork.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_tra...
I am happy that this kind of tracking project exists.
The current tariffs policy of Trump's regime could even be a market manipulation for their personal enrichnent: send the stock markets crashing with a very dumb financial decision, buy a lot of stocks when they are low, and right after cancel the dumb decision, and then profit.
They have nuked the SEC for a reason, haven't they?
Let me know which politicians buy VT, I'll copy that.
I don't want to track them, I want to mirror them.
Oh the product offerings are way ahead of that. Until recently, you could invest in Inverse Jim Cramer. Plenty of passive and active funds for Nancy Pelosi.
Inverse Jim Cramer ETF closed 1 year ago due to lack of interest, sheesh.
To follow Pelosi, just look up the public record on the government website. It tells you the date and the product he used. Then just look up the chart for that day and look at the price range.
How up to date is this? Months via disclosure?
Is there a CRYPTO equivalent of this?